This wasn’t so much a comedy as a tale of desperate folk grappling with a script in which drama was strictly rationed and the jokes had gone AWOL.

On the opening night, the acoustics were poor, though this flaw might have been an oversight by the theatre rather than Calibre Productions, the outfit responsible for bringing the stage version of Dad’s Army to Oxford a few months ago with mixed results. When the cast are bandying about the sort of ‘foreign’ accents rarely heard beyond the frontiers of sit-comland, it was a miscalculation to let the actors perform without individual microphones.

There were plenty of empty seats, which seemed ominous as the curtain opened on a plain set, modelled on Rene Artois’ café, the focal point of Croft and Lloyd’s inexplicably successful farce. The dark expanse of the theatre was the wrong setting for something requiring the tight framing of the small screen and two hours was too long for material so thin it made Carry On Camping seem like Hamlet.

The first half introduced the hidden RAF airmen only to ignore them in favour of madcap routines about hiding the Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies in sausages, interspersed with snatches of Herr Flick’s kinky relationship with the svelte Helga (Nell Jerram, pictured). Following the interval — after which the man previously sitting next to me did not return to his seat — the plot mutated into an excuse for several of the actors to run around dressed as Hitler or Goering, by which time I would have been happy for the RAF to blitz the lot of them.

The performances were so-so — while Vicky Michelle (Yvette) and Judy Buxton (Michelle) tried their best with what was available, Jeffrey Holland was forgettable as Rene; James Rossman (Flick) will probably go on to better things. In the words of Captain Alberto Bertorelli (Martin Carroll): "Whadda mistaika to maika".