For this show, the stage at VK’s Comedy & Blues Bar features a large sign: ‘The Eleventy Nine O’Clock News’. This will come into its own. The shopping trollies, however, are just for decoration.

The good news first: The Biddys – Joanne Sharp, Lesley O’Hara and Kim James – can sing. Their three-part harmonising is the high point of their self-created hour-long show. Their witty lyrics, to old-time popular tunes, are pretty clever too; you can get away with a lot when it scans and rhymes.

Dressed in ‘cleaning lady’ pinafores and headscarves, they open with a parody of Irving Berlin’s ‘Sisters’ (from the 1954 film White Christmas): “Biddy, Biddys, there were never three more barmy Biddys …” The are crazy, mad, mental and incontinental … This heralds a recurring theme: loss of bladder control in later years. Indeed their publicity claim – “Absorbent pants a must!!” – hopes their humour will put us in the same predicament. Not tonight, I’m afraid.

Having introduced themselves as a girl band – Bridie, Bridget and Bernadette – they set the low comedy tone with a misplaced suppository gag. I can only suppose a 1950s joke book was their primary source of material, although reference to a “clever phone” is more contemporary. No prizes for guessing which feature comes, so to speak, to the fore.

Suddenly they are required to read ‘The Eleventy Nine O’Clock News’, so reintroduce themselves as Connie Lingus, Annie Rection and Jenny Taylier. Similar verbal punishment litters the ‘news items’ which are basically recycled Irish jokes (and not the best I’ve heard by a long shot). They also manage to mess up the delivery of the old Billy T James gag about police station toilets being stolen, leaving the police with nothing to go on.

To be fair, much of the delivery is reasonably well timed, it’s just that the invariably long stories have underwhelming punchlines.

Although they introduce it as a menstruation song, ‘Necessary Things’ (to ‘My Favourite Things’ from Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music) is more about post-menopausal medication and embrocation requirements.

The sexual shenanigans of nonagenarians, holey (sic) horrors beyond the Pearly Gates, confession and constipation all get an airing before what should be the finale: their Andrews sisters-styled version of ‘In The Mood’ (Joe Garland and Andy Razaf). Unfortunately they choose to undercut the sublimity of it with shtick (blarney; blather) about their morning toileting habits.  

The predominantly female audience does titter at some of the retro humour, it has to be said, although more to start with than towards the end, so if that’s your thing … Personally I’d prefer more songs. 

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