To the sound of pop music, polythene cagoules are distributed to the front two rows. Once we’ve all hushed and settled down in front of the closed stage curtains, there’s a very low key introduction from a bespectacled bloke in a white shirt. He attempts to get us warmed up, there’s a bit of a delay, he tries a lame joke… it’s all very tame. Eventually the curtains open to reveal live pop group The Coolness, all leopardskin, leotards, and leggings, loud and lewdly lunging. We are chucked back to the late 1970s and Saturday morning children’s TV.

What an extraordinarily wild and raucously chaotic evening of theatre. Never Try This at Home is centred on a fictional present-day ‘talking heads’ TV show titled Looking Back Together, a show that revels in digging up memorable ‘cultural’ moments, reuniting victims, accusers, and abusers and reminiscing about traumatic TV events and atrocities from the past. Reconciliation and atonement? Or pure high rating TV? We the audience are the real live ‘TV studio’ audience. The key event, or should we say occasion, that’s being recalled took place live on air during the Saturday morning TV show, Shushi…. which stand for ‘Say Hello Up, Say Hello…’ no-one remembers what the I stands for. With obvious parallels to real shows such as Multi-Coloured Swop Shop, Tiswas and Live & Kicking, there are exclamations of ‘Let’s run about a bit!’, chaotic, daft, vacuous leaping about, and interjections of comedy segments like Nobby’s Tool Time, Kick a Vicar, and Put him in the Stocks. Back in 1979, the perpetually-humiliated only female on the Shushi presenting team could take no more misogynistic treatment and almost succeeded in taking her own life, live on air, amid splatterings of baked beans. Scenes in freeze-frame slo-mo flashback ‘rescreening footage’ are recreated on stage. With unabashed lashings of custard pies and cruelty, it’s awful and appalling, hilarious and ridiculous, all in slick, disturbingly uncomfortable ‘now just sit back and enjoy this’ proportions.

Written before the Savile enquiry and subsequent revelations, Never Try This at Home is a bonkers high-octane show. Petra Massey excels as the swirly-patterned flared-trousered children’s TV presenter, as does Niall Ashdown as the enquiring, let’s-get-to-the-root-of-this, whatever-it-takes TV host. I really didn’t know what to expect or what I’d experience next. Wonderfully paced, performed and produced, full of awful stereotyping (racial, national and sexual), you come out wondering if it’s OK to have enjoyed such a disturbingly funny show so much… and grateful not to have sat in the first two rows.