The tweed-fragranced time bomb lurking beind thid idea was that both women were members of the women's Institute. Rather like MI5, the WI is one of those presences that has always been part of my life.; never overt but always close, always watching. my mum was a member and my gran firmly enough entrenched to have visited the Queen on its behalf.

Its presence made itself felt more keenly when I was asked by Harbour Pictures to begin work on a film about those WI women who had posed for a nude calendar.

I realised with Hitchcockian crawling horror that not only had the said calendar been hanging in my house the previous year; but that I'd bought it from one of those actual naked ladies at Rylstone in NorthYorkshire. And I had no less than five paintings in my house from the gallery run by Terry Logan who took all the calendar girl photographs.

So where did I start? Really, when describing the WI, one should avoid strapping on adjectives like 'tweed-fragranced', which lazily perpetuates the image of quaint anachronism. True, elements of the WI are exactly that, but all the memebers are in on the joke.

In the film, Chris Haper, played by Helen Mirren, says early on that she only joined the WI to keep her mum happy but by the time her mum died she herself was terminally esconced. My mother gave the same reason and, like Chris, kept on going. For her, part of the joy was returning home every wekk to say, 'You'll never guess what the speech was about this week.'.

My opening scene was a quickfire snapshot of various such speeches - and the original girls voiced concern. ;Maybe,' they said at our first powow in Bolton Abbey, 'a speech on the history of broccolu is pushing it a bit.'. then someone pointed out that the week's talk at their own WI had been on the historyof the tea towel. the subsequent recap of former talks produced titles of speeches which Iwould never have dared feature - although the history of tea towels did make it into the final scene in a late rewrite.

For me, the greatedt anomaly about the orgaisation is the word 'institute'. The resonance of the word is of a place one enters not particularly happily, nor indeed of one's own free will. It seems to sit more comfortably alongside Chartered Surveyors or The Criminally Insane than it does Women.

My grandmother's own village meetings wer held in a place called the Milner Institute, which I always imagined to have been handed to the community by a mustachioed Victorian benefactor to distract the local youths from sex.

Institute is pungent with the late-Victorian prudisheness, propriety, soundness-of-mind, edification and sexless fun. None of which would interest the WI members I know. After a century of change, the original ethos of the WI is still regarded by its ladies - and protected - with wry affection.

Abuse that understanding at your peril; Tony Blair, when he 'gatecrashed' their National Conference in 200, was summarily heckled and slow-hand-clapped. These are women who, in the larger part, will be the driving force behind families, relationships, businesses - they are not going to trudge off institutionally to meeting if there is nothing in it for them.

What they get from it is laughter. Laughter at the codes; laughter at the events; laughter at, and with, each other in the nexus of lives it constitutes. The WI may once have prospered as a reaction to the preponderance of all-male societies but now it contitutes less a female working-men's club than a middle-aged youth club.

the production of the calendar is the proof positive of the liberalisation of the institute. It is hard to imagine the original Canadian WI so readily embracing nudity in 1897, nor their first British counterparts in 1915. In fact the only time I ran up against the WI authorities with the script was in the third draft, when I suggested that the Central committee had not been supportive.

There was another sticky moment. Aware of a deliberate script error - I had included butter-cream in the ingredients for a Victorian sponge - I was hoping to slip it through on the grounds of its usical quality within the line. Instead, I was hauled up on stage during filming and received pretty much the same treatment afforded he Prime Minister.

Of course support for the calendar was not universal. Of couse some women objected; but I realised that to imply an organsiation so defined by laughter would frown at a suggestiom of such obvious wit just didn't ring true.

This movie was never going to be about how opposition affected the calebdar's orogress; but conversely, about how the speed of the calendar's progress affected the women. It was when re-reading the shooting script for the final time when I realised what my structure had turned the film into: it is an epic venture underatsken by two women aware of the intrinsic insanity, but driven on by a reawakened sense of schoolgirl complicity.

It has been described as a sort of female Full Monty but, if anything,m it's a middle-aged Thelma and Louise.