Dial M for Murgatroyd receives four stars from THE TIMES

The village of Great Clumping is in uproar. Lady Fitzall, frustrated squire’s wife and object of desire for Mr Prickett the butcher, is warring with her husband over the fruit and produce show. Their white-hunter daughter is back from the Congo with a captive gorilla, and refuses to marry Sir Gerald Bartrum the rubber tycoon — “Business is stretched, but we bounce back”. Their son Fenton (yes, that joke too) is worryingly effete, and something sinister is brewing in a secret laboratory. Mad Meg the witch is stirring a cauldron of puppet frogs and two butlers, Barking and Braintree, meet mysterious deaths.

We are in a spoof 1950s mystery, signalled on our entrance by the Music While You Work theme. Miss Murgatroyd must outdo the blundering Inspector Jessop. Billed as an “alternative to the traditional Christmas panto”, this new satire with music was written by Julian Harries and Pat Whymark, whose Dick Turpin I so loved. The playwrights have created a blissful cross between a Round the Horne parody of The Mousetrap and a proper old-fashioned revue. As well as playing piano, drums, fiddle, spoons and accordion the five actors play 20 characters, handling between two and seven each. As we get familiar with the doubling this involves some fine in-jokes, panicky wig-changing and noises off (a manly butcher dashes onstage with Miss M’s huge bust still beneath his apron). Harries and Whymark also have a nice way with props, bringing on enough to indicate a bicycle, car, aircraft and a set of cellar steps, created with a sloping banister and some painful knee-bends.

The tight writing and sheer discipline shine. The jokes are nicely Fifties with traditional butts such as a wimp, a Scotsman and Ramirez the ardent Latino sergeant. There is some fine Kenneth Hornery: “Think of the position a man like Sir Gerald will place you in!” pleads the father, to which his daughter replies: “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Boom boom!

They use the audience as scenery, including a forest: “All these gnarled and wizened old stumps — one can almost imagine seeing hideous human faces in them,” etc. Daft physical jokes are chucked in at speed, never milked and some lines have a precious unexpected oddity. The son chucks on a seatbelt in the jalopy, saying, “One day everyone will wear these” and Lady Fitzall shrugs: “Oh, let the boy tie himself to a chair if he wants to.”

As the bunting rises unsteadily to the roof for the Village Show and Guess the Weight of the Vicar, dastardly plots are unveiled. Contentment is general.