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Alfred Byrne (Albert Finney) is a middle-aged bus conductor in Dublin, Ireland in 1963. He would appear to live a life of quiet desperation: he's gay, but firmly closeted, and his sister is always trying to find him "the right girl". His passion is Oscar Wilde, his hobby is putting on amateur theatre productions in the local church hall. We follow him as he struggles with temptation, friendship, disapproval, and the conservative yet oddly lyrical world of Ireland in the early 1960s.

Muriel finds life in Porpoise Spit, Australia dull and spends her days alone in her room listening to ABBA and dreaming of her wedding day. A slight problem is she never had a date. Then she steals some money to go on a tropical vacation, meets a wacky friend, changes her name to Mariel, and turns her world upside down.

A married couple who have managed to remain blissfully happy into their autumn years, are surrounded over the course of the four seasons of one average year by friends, colleagues, and family who all seem to suffer some degree of unhappiness.

The stories of a diverse group of Londoners is presented, they thrown together out of circumstance. Couple Cyril and Shirley, a motorcycle courier and gardener respectively, live in a flat overlooking Kings Cross Station. They generally espouse Marxism and the rights of the workers, and while Cyril is arguably more philosophical about their political views, he also doesn't believe that an uprising of the working class will ever happen. While they deal with their more militant friend Suzi who Cyril calls out for what he sees as her hypocritical attitude, and with a stranger named Wayne who has just arrived in the city for a job while unable to connect with his sister with who he was supposed to stay, they have a disagreement of their own as Shirl contemplates having a baby, which Cyril believes is a bad idea in this world. They rarely associate with Cyril's sister Valerie and her used car lot dealer husband Martin. Nouveau riche, narcissistic Valerie is all about presenting herself as well-off, while she is totally neglected by brash Martin, who is a chronic philanderer. Cyril, Shirl and Valerie only need to speak to each other in their respective interactions with Cyril and Valerie's seventy year old mother, Mrs. Bender, who still lives on her own in a council house, but who is just starting to show signs of dementia. Cyril, Shirl, Valerie and Mrs. Bender eventually meet the latter's relatively new neighbors, wealthy, snobbish and somewhat garish husband and wife Rupert and Lætitia. While Rupert and Lætitia are openly perturbed by needing to help helpless Mrs. Bender, which is only exacerbated by meeting the other three, Valerie can only do her best to ingratiate herself with people wealthier than her.

Not so aged widow Thelma Caldicot is coerced into a rest home by her manipulative son and daughter-in-law after the death of her bullying husband. Apathy turns to anger and then action as the medication is discarded and Thelma discovers her mettle. She and her aged cohorts stage a rebellion but the result is something nobody envisaged.

The lucky winner of the national lottery is Ned Devine, so taken by his good fortune that he now can't be waked, because he died from the shock of it! News of the win spread quickly in the scenic little Irish village of Tully More, but not the secret news of Ned's demise. With lottery officials closing in to confirm the prize claimed by the deceased Devine, Ned's closest friends scheme to keep the prize money close to home, in memory of Ned of course! But as the plot twists humorously, they learn it is hard is to keep such a secret in a small town.

In existence for a hundred years, Grimley Colliery Brass band is as old as the mine. But the miners are now deciding whether to fight to keep the pit open, and the future for town and band looks bleak. Although the arrival of flugelhorn player Gloria injects some life into the players, and bandleader Danny continues to exhort them to continue in the national competition, frictions and pressures are all too evident. And whose side is Gloria actually on?

Mrs. Palfrey (Dame Joan Plowright), recently widowed after a long happy marriage, moves into a London residential hotel more lively and elegant on-line than in fact. She determines to make the best of it amongst an odd assortment of people, and she particularly hopes her grandson, a London resident, will visit. When she slips on a walk and is aided by penniless young writer Ludo (Rupert Friend), she invites him to dine at the Claremont and plays along when her dining mates assume he's her grandson. A friendship develops giving her a companion with whom she can talk about memories and poetry and giving him ideas and support for his writing. But what of her actual family? How it plays out is the movie's story.

Iris can best be described as a wallflower. She begins her first day as a temp for the nondescript Global Credit Association by waiting in a chair for two hours. This sets the scene for her (mis)adventures with the other "corporate orphans", Margaret, Paula and Jane. Led by Margaret, they find subtle ways to lessen the ennui of corporate oppression. The tension escalates when the new permanent hire, Cleo, enters the picture.

In the decaying steel mill town of Sheffield in Northern England, friends Gaz and Dave, both now unemployed and on the dole after the closure of most of the town's steel mills, steal scrap metal from the closed mills to supplement their meager income, often with Gaz's twelve year old son, Nathan, on the days Gaz has custody. Still, Gaz is behind in child support payments to his ex-wife, Mandy. When Mandy threatens to sue for full custody in that Gaz can't support Nathan in any way, Gaz, seeing the long line up of women clamoring to get in to see a touring Chippendales styled dance troupe, thinks he can solve his financial and thus custody problems by forming his own male exotic dance troupe with some of his fellow un- or underemployed ex-mill workers. In addition to Dave, he has in mind middle-aged Gerald, their former foreman who has not told his spending-happy wife Linda that he has been unemployed for six months, and Lomper, a mild-mannered security guard who they just met in the act of him trying to commit suicide in his depression. The obvious problem is that with the exception of Gerald who knows how to ballroom dance, they are not generally stripper material, either in looks, skill or temperament, with especially slightly overweight Dave having body image issues, he believing his wife, Jean, having a wandering eye because of what he considers his unappealing looks. In an open casting among those at the employment office, they are able to recruit further misfits Horse, an older man who does know the contemporary dances of his era, and younger Guy, who can't dance and can't sing but loves

In a staid English seaside town after the Second World War, young Lynda grows up with her widowed father and younger sister. Rebellious Lynda has been swearing constantly from an early age. At sixteen, she becomes more exhibitionist and seeks out sexual encounters challenging the prevailing lower-middle class attitudes to sex. She eventually becomes pregnant by an acquaintance of her father.

Career girls opens with a train journey towards London's Kings Cross where Annie, one of the major characters is about to meet her old university friend Hannah. She recalls moving into a grotty student flat with Hannah in the mid-eighties. In those days Annie was self conscious and jumpy. The pair have not seen one another since graduation. They both now have moderately successful careers and are, at least on the surface, self assured in their new lives. However, they are still carrying a lot of emotional baggage from their university days. During the course of a weekend they rediscover their close friendship and encounter many faces from the past.

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

Henry Orient (Peter Sellers) is a madly egocentric and overly amorous avant-garde concert pianist who is hilariously pursued all around New York City by two fourteen-year-old fans. The girls, Valarie "Val" Campbell Boyd (Tippy Walker) and Marian "Gil" Gilbert (Merrie Spaeth) chase a harassed Henry all over the city, thwarting his afternoon liaisons with a married woman and leaving utter chaos behind them - until Val's sexually promiscuous mother, Isabel (Dame Angela Lansbury), appears on the scene to put a stop to the girls' shenanigans.

In Liverpool, twenty-seven-year-old hairdresser Rita (Dame Julie Walters) decides to complete her basic education before having children, as desired by her husband Denny (Malcolm Douglas). She joins a literature course in an open university and is tutored by the middle-aged Dr. Frank Bryant (Sir Michael Caine), an alcoholic and debauched professor from the upper-class, whose life has left him emotionally drained, without self-esteem. Frank lives with Julia (Jeananne Crowley), who's also a professor, and has a loveless marriage. Julia has a love affair with Dean Brian (Michael Williams). Rita's humor and determination to improve herself is contagious. She gives motivation to Frank, who helps prepare her for the exams to join the university, and be able to leave Denny. Will she succeed in the exams?

Radio host Alan Bird witnesses how an ice cream van is attacked and destroyed by an angry competitor. This leads him into the struggle between two Italian families, the Bernardis and the Rossis, over whose ice cream vans can sell where in Glasgow.

Jack Stanton is running for president. The election is seen through the eyes of young Henry Burton. Along the way Stanton must deal with a sex scandal.

For Alfie, the only real life is sex life. Only then, can he kid himself he is living. Sex is not used as the working-class boy's way to "the top". Executive status has no appeal for Alfie. Nor has class mobility. He is quite content to stay where he is, as long as the "birds" are in "beautiful condition", as he assures us they are in one of the candid, over-the-shoulder asides to the camera which this movie carries over from Tom Jones (1963). This movie shows how much of the "swinging 60s" quality of London life was a male creation, and through the dominance of the fashion photographers, a male prerogative.