With ruthless US and Japanese investment banks circling Tuftons, a struggling two-hundred-year-old, family-run British bank, can its bumbling, incompetent chairman, Sir Charles Bunbury, fend off the onslaught and save the bank?

At a home for retired musicians, the annual concert to celebrate Composer Giuseppe Verdi's birthday is disrupted by the arrival of Jean (Dame Maggie Smith), an eternal diva and the former wife of one of the residents.