The hero of Peter Cattaneo's film is Gaz Robert Carlyle a redundant steelworker whose

The hero of Peter Cattaneo's film is Gaz (Robert Carlyle), a redundant steelworker whose ex-wife Mandy (Emily Woof) has moved to a new faux- Georgian estate with their nine-year-old son. Gaz's mates are similarly undermined: Dave (Mark Addy) is struggling with impotence, and fears that his wife (Lesley Sharp) will run off with one of her fit young colleagues at Asda. In The Full Monty's Sheffield the working man is an oxymoron. The only way male dignity can be re- invented is for blokes to get their kits off and wave their todgers in the air. Then the screen blacks out with the caption, "25 years later".

We're in the present day, and civic modernism has been discredited by the heritage pub, stone cladding, and the fact that Marxism is dead as Adorno. A smoothly cheerful voiceover that might once have been used to advertise Dralon Zed beds enumerates the city's industrial triumphs. Tower blocks gleam in the sun, buses cruise around new concrete roundabouts, molten steel bubbles in crucibles. For its title sequence, The Full Monty (15) resurrects a Seventies promo film for Sheffield, a showreel that may have influenced the aesthetic Weltanschauung of a young Jarvis Cocker It's new-town retro with a hint of Soviet optimism. Sprinkle shelves with shells, ships-in-bottles and chipped, white enamelware; hang old, tinted postcards of sea-haven resorts, navigation maps and rope-wrapped mirrors on the walls.

Add aquamarine oils to your bath water and you're home and away. All you need is a tape recording of screeching gulls and water slapping against harbour walls, and you could be in St Ives.. Look out for ammonites, pretty pebbles, shapely pieces of driftwood and rusted ironwork.The bathroom is perhaps the best home space in which to effect a pretence of seaside life. Line surfaces with tongue and groove panelling and slap on a wash of lime white, blue-green or sandy yellow paint Strip the floorboards and paint them, too.

Scavengers on the beach can also unearth the odd decorative treasure among the rubbishy tide-lines of lost flip-flops and plastic bottles. The local antique shops proved a good source of old maps, marine paintings, postcards and binoculars. A recent trawl around the shops of Fowey, a clay mining port and marina in Cornwall, revealed supplies of rope and canvas, nets and fishing tackle, hurricane lamps and variously-sized model yachts complete with mini rigging and sails. Paint- treated woodwork simulates the cracked and peeling surface of an old boat that has endured years of salt-water erosion, while natural pine panelling has the look of a ship's cabin.There is no substitute for living by the sea, but you can add touches of marine atmosphere to your inland home with a few seaside souvenirs - and the best buys are found in the chandlers of salty fishing harbours rather than the seafront gift shops of coastal resorts. Judith Miller's Wooden Houses, published later this month by Ryland, Peters & Small, presents sea-view interiors furnished with maritime maps, coils of rope, wall-hung oars and flying seagulls on ship-lapped walls, colour-washed in sky-blue or bleached white.In Seaside House (Ebury Press), Jerome Darblay and Alexandra D'Arnoux explore a series of interiors, mostly American, furnished with bunk beds, lobster pots, rope hammocks, telescopes and boat propellers, shelves laden with pebbles and shells, blue and white pottery and wooden seabirds.