Just imagine the absurdity of two openly gay, recently ‘married’ middle aged, middle class men escaping the liberal sanctuary of anonymous London to relocate to a Muslim country. Jack and Liam, fed up with kiss-my-arse bosses and nose-to-nipple commutes, chuck in the towel and move to a small town in Turkey. Join the culture-curious gay couple on their bumpy rite of passage. Meet the oddballs, VOMITs, vetpats, emigreys, semigreys, randy waiters and middle England miseries. When prejudice and ignorance emerge from the crude underbelly of Turkey’s expat life, Jack and Liam waver. Determined to stay the course, the happy hedonistas hitch up their skirts, flee to laissez-faire Bodrum and fall under the spell of their intoxicating foster land. Enter Jack’s irreverent world for a right royal dose of misery and joy, bigotry and enlightenment, betrayal and loyalty, friendship, love, earthquakes, birth, adoption and murder. Suburban life was never this eventful. You couldn't make it up. A bitter-sweet tragi-comedy that recalls the first year of a British gay couple living in a Muslim land.

Have you ever wondered what it’s really like to pitch your tent on a foreign field, particularly a Muslim one? Guidebooks only go so far. To get a real feel, you need to ask someone who’s been there, done that and bought all the fake designer t-shirts. When Jack Scott and his Civil Partner, Liam, moved to Turkey nothing could prepare them for what was to come – heatstroke, frostbite, biblical floods, Byzantine red tape, lazy censorship, blackouts, bugs from Hell, rancid drains, lunatic drivers, dirty politics, spring-loaded waiters, jaw-dropping sunsets, kindness, generosity and acceptance. They stumbled upon what Jack infamously described as the mad, the bad, the sad and the glad. Jack wrote it all down in a blog for all the world to ignore. He called it Perking the Pansies. Against the odds and quite by surprise, Perking the Pansies grew into the most successful blog of its kind in Turkey, attracting a loyal following, the attention of the Turkish national press and hatched an award-winning Amazon number one best-selling book.

In 2009, Jack Scott and his Civil Partner, Liam, sold off the family silver and jumped the good ship Blighty for Muslim Turkey. They parachuted into paradise with eyes firmly shut and hoped for the best. When the blindfolds were removed what they saw wasn’t pretty. They found themselves peering over the rim of a Byzantine bear pit. Bitching and pretension ruled the emigrey roost. The white-washed ghettos were populated by neo-colonial bar-room bores who hated the country they’d come from and hated the country they’d come to, and were obsessed with property prices, pork products and street dogs. Expat life was village life where your business was everyone’s business. For Liam, it was the barren badlands of the lost and lonely. For Jack it was the last stand of the charmless Raj - 'Tenko' without the guards, the guns and the barbed wire. It took them a while to find their feet and separate the wheat from the chavs but, determined to stay the course, eventually they found diamonds in the rough and roses among the weeds.