Fed up with working hard just to scrape by, Christine Painter comes up with a bold plan to become the madam of a brothel and earn her financial freedom: she opens a house of spanking to fabulous reviews.

Unexpected events occur when Pat, a glamorous British-born star of American soaps, returns home to plug her auto-biography on television and meets, for the first time since they were teenagers, Margaret her plain and frumpy younger sister. The meeting is painful for both women highlighting the vast differences in their lives and resurrecting painful memories of their unhappy childhood with an uncaring, errant mother. The tabloid press smell a juicy story and a race ensues to trace the whereabouts of the long lost parent.