Who would have thought it? Almost a year after it pitched camp at The Venue this resurrected 60s radio show is not only still there: it has come up with a Christmas edition thanks to its sole surviving scriptwriter, Brian Cooke, whose delight in old sketches is bottomless.
Today, only I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue can match Round The Horne for double-entendres. How you can resist a Cinderella ball patronised by Lady Sarah FitzTight? Or a female thesp who lasciviously claims "I remember George Robey's Twankey as if it were yesterday." Or Julian of Bona Catering saying: "I can do something provocative in a sponge?"
One of the joys of English, as the original quartet of writers realised, is that any word in the right context can take on a patina of filth.
The writers' gift for literary parody was not in the same class as that of Take It From Here. But they do a very funny Oliver Twist which whisks us back to a Victorian London full of "hansom cabs and ugly cabbies" and where the apprentice undertaker varnishes the corpse instead of the coffin: "Still, at least he had a lovely finish."
The show's real strength was that it allowed a group of revue-trained actors to revolve around the figure of Kenneth Horne and in Michael Kingsbury's production they are all impeccably embodied. Jonathan Rigby's upright Horne is the perfect straight man in a cornucopia of camp. Robin Sebastian captures the braying laugh of Kenneth Williams. Kate Brown's Betty Marsden and Nigel Harrison's Hugh Paddick are at their best as an infatuated theatrical couple wondering whether he should give it to her before or after the Queen's speech: her Christmas present, that is.
In theory, we should be worried about the way our theatre is slowly turning into a dead comics' society which has lately celebrated Morecambe and Wise, and Tommy Cooper. But, given a show as funny as this, one's caveats crumble into dust.
· Until January 22. Box office: 0870 899 3335.
