Cutting edge satirical comedy is easy to find these days, on TV and radio.

So why pay to see it live?

Well, it's well worth the outlay when delivered by experts with an incisive line in topicality and razor sharp delivery. Otherwise, save your money.

The Joy of Politics is anything but: a joyless excursion into retro-land, with nothing new to say said by performers who lack the focus of the people from whom they appear to take their inspiration.

One scene saw the performers as two politicians trying to find a new slogan for the Tory party, Andrew Jones ranting like a third rate Rik Mayall at Ciaran Murtagh's desperate underling.

In another Jones was a social benefits freeloader, trying to bamboozle Murtagh's dumb-founded MP, with a long-winded story about his daughter's inexhaustible sex life, looking like a latter day Dudley Moore in raincoat and cap but without a jot of the dead master's genius delivery.

There are a few atrocious songs, including a Go Left parody of Village People's Go West in which the duo, bizarrely dressed as Karl Marx in boiler suits, sing and dance even worse than X Factor's Jedward – something I thought impossible to achieve.

And as for the Martin Luther King/Abba I Have a Dream number, the least said the better.

I quite enjoyed the audience participation slot. But satire is all about originality and delivering the topical, the outrageous, the shocking, the unsayable. There was precious little of that here. A big disappointment.

·Until November 22.

Diana Eccleston

2 stars