Notices on the doors to the auditorium warn of full-frontal nudity and very strong language in Funny Peculiar. A more useful announcement might have been that here was a comedy seriously short on laughs — from my seat in the stalls, at any rate.

Around me, I do not deny, were some people — not many people — enjoying Mike Stott’s dated drama. Harking back to the 1970s, this witless and embarrassing piece serves to remind us that this was indeed “the decade that taste forgot”.

To enjoy Funny Peculiar you need to be possessed of the old-fashioned, saucy-seaside-postcard attitude that there is something essentially comic about sex. More so when, as here, it involves characters from the north of England played by actors familiar from TV soaps.

The focus of the action is shopkeeper Trevor Tinsley (Craig Gazey), a junior version of Ronnie Barker’s Arkwright, except that he takes a much stronger interest in sex. This is a pity, perhaps, since his wife Irene, played by the Dancing on Ice champ Suzanne Shaw, finds it rather a grubby activity, valuable only as a means of procreation and to be conducted with the lights switched off.

Thus it is that Trevor submits to the pneumatic pleasures of randy ‘other woman’ Shirley Smith, portrayed by Gemma Bissix, whom soap-fans know as EastEnders’ Clare Bates. She has a very open relationship with her easy-going husband Eric (Sam Nicholl).

A consequence of this rumpy-pumpy is that Mr Gazey gets to show his wedding tackle, thereby affording his fans a rather more complete picture of himself than he ever offered as Coronation Street’s Graeme Proctor.

For the rest, there’s a decent enough turn from Vicky Entwistle (Corry’s Janice Battersby) as a stereotypical Northern gossip-cum-battleaxe, and a sympathetic account by Stephen Blakeley (Emmerdale/Heartbeat) of her simple son. To him is given one of the few genuinely funny lines of the night when — in recognition of everyone’s right to a sex life — he notes that there is actually someone at his day centre who is earning his living from stopping him from copulating (another word is used).

Until Saturday. wycombeswan./co.uk (10494 512000).