With the youngest of their children finally off to university, bank manager Belinda Braithwaite (Hannah Gordon, MY WIFE NEXT DOOR) wants to retire and she wants stay-at-home inventor husband David (DOWNTON ABBEY's Peter Egan) to go out and get a job. David, however, likes things the way they are, having spent eight years raising the children after his business failed and spends his days doing Meals on Wheels, volunteering on the parish social club, and the serving on the Citizen's Advisory Board. While David tries to make Belinda see the ramifications of her quitting her high-paying job and the difficulty of his getting back into the workforce after eight years, Belinda is discovering just how important she is regarded in the boy's club of banking as the "token women" and the tempting offers her superiors try to woo her with in order to keep her. Most sitcoms about married couples are dependent on deception and emotional manipulation, and JOINT ACCOUNT has it in spades as David and Belinda engage in standoffs over putting the house (and by extension family memories) on the market, go on an economizing challenge on the week when each finds themselves in need of extra money and then must entertain business guests, and needle each other about notions of masculinity and femininity in business and domestic issues. David's emotional manipulation of his wife would be appalling were it not for Belinda's flightiness about the substantial change of lifestyle she wants to undertake. She wants David to go back to work in order to "be a man" and she wants to return to the "role" she was meant for - and, she says, should never have left - yet she seems to have no notion of the practicalities of running the house and even at one point changes her mind when she comes up with the idea of adopting her receptionist Jessica's (Ruth Mitchell) baby with the plan of David raising it while she continued to work. Strangely, Belinda and David are at their best in terms of audience entertainment when apart, as Belinda tangles with sexist peon Ned Race (John Bird, JABBERWOCKY) who is after her job or slimy superior Ricketts (Andrew Hilton) who is romancing her towards more corporate responsibility while David carries on a mock-flirtation with "the slut from next door" Louise (Lill Roughley) or consults with absent-minded though still randy attorney friend Charles (Richard Aylen, THE JIGSAW MAN).