Sea View Babylon: Sex, Violence & Spanish Verb Conjugation

Mick and Jim are two incompetent, Soho-based, corporate video producers, operating at the bottom of a barrel that no one wants to scrape. They drink too much, don’t earn enough and get too many death threats.

They are forced into an unexpected visit to the little seaside town of Playa Blanca in Lanzarote. They book into Sea View, a bizarre re-creation of a 1950's Blackpool boarding house, right next to the beach.

Sea View is run by the maniacal Fernando who is learning English at a local bar, where holidaying Brits are teaching him a vast range of obscene phrases which he mixes happily with his innate courtesy and friendliness.

Mick and Jim arrive with video footage which they think will make them millions, but a short telephone call to the BBC reveals they have been thwarted - and that the footage is worthless.

Down but not out, they decide to do what normal people do, and take a holiday break.

On their first afternoon, while enjoying a pedalo ride, they are threatened with assassination by both the CIA and KGB, and drawn into a web of espionage lies, deceit and sexual excess involving MI7 - so secret, even MI5 and MI6 don't know about it.

We find out more about MI7 and its 'Mata Hari' team - specially trained to extract information while seducing enemy agents. The team of six includes a 60-year old ex-contortionist, a Girton College Cambridge graduate masquerading as a chav, a mature, land-owning aristocrat, a cool dungareed lady, Olga, a super-fit Norwegian, and Moira MacPherson, who appeared briefly in Daring Dooz as the chairwoman of Aberdeen's Society of Global Missionary Zeal and Probity.

The head of MI7, Jimmi Bond, apart from putting up with the jokes, has brought the team together in Playa Blanca with an extremely serious goal - to avoid the end of the world as we know it.

The CIA agent, Chuck Berry III (no relation) and the KGB agent Boris Pasternak (no relation) are in town, because they've heard that something big is going down. As they are starved of information, Chuck persuades Boris to defect so they can work together.

One by one, the MI7 agents disappear in mysterious ways. For example, Mick and Jim find an empty pedalo (The Marie Celeste) abandoned at midnight, with just the remains of a Thermos flask of hot coffee and two partially eaten ham sandwiches.

The local Police Chief is a long-term Anglophile with poor English - 'I love St. Pauline's Cathedral' - interviews Mick and Jim about the disappearances and tells them they are not suspects, although he has a range of double-crosses and ulterior motives up his sleeve.

Mick and Jim end up in the nearly-infamous Cell 102, with just two stools and a bucket for company. Their route to freedom involves prostituting their professional standards (not that they have any), a rusty helicopter on the police station roof and two aggressive Louisiana swamp cowboys who are attending a local Harley Davidson Rally.

Part of the solution involves flying Wayne over from the UK. Wayne is a hyperactive, over-enthusiastic, Game Boy-playing video production gofer, who dreams of Steven Spielberg asking him to say 'It's a wrap'. When Mick and Jim are freed, Wayne reveals that Boris and Chuck have moved into the Sea View Guest House.

Following a desperate climb to their attic room, using the plastic vines adorning the front of the Guest House, Mick and Jim decide to keep watch as they are the only residents, apart from Jimmi, Chuck and Boris. Someone has to make a move.

The climatic bullet-riddled showdown in an auditorium built into a volcanic blow-hole is orchestrated by Polly, the world's most foul-beaked parrot.

Adventure over, and back in their Soho offices, Mick and Jim use their version of the Erle Stanley Gardner plot wheel to decide their future. Just as they have reached a decision, something happens to make them reconsider. The option on offer appears evil, sinister and, certainly, life-threatening. Do they go for it, or not?