Such fun we forget the plot's so flimsy - Christopher Gray is transported back to the halcyon days of church youth clubs

Sexy Sue announces to a prospective date that she is free on Saturday night, which prompts some waggish (and ungentlemanly) fellow member of St Mungo’s Church Youth Club to remark that for the rest of the week she charges half a crown.

Yes, the level of wit in Dreamboats and Petticoats is all that might be expected from such seasoned practitioners as Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the writers who gave us Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and Love Hurts, among much else.

That it is a period piece — “early Sixties, somewhere in Essex” — is apparent in my mention of the church youth club, where such fun as we had at the time was generally to be found, and that now forgotten sum of half a crown. What’s that? Any twenty-something — come to that, forty-something — might well wonder. Not that there are many of those at the New Theatre this week, for this a show aimed squarely at the market for nostalgia. It’s for those of us who were around in the sixties, and do remember them.

Mind you, the sixties here are not what is generally meant by the phrase. I mean, we are pre-Beatles, when the likes of Roy Orbison, Dion, Bobby Vee and Helen Shapiro ruled the charts.

Song after wonderful song from the time pack the show. These are impeccably performed live on stage by the whole team under musical supervisor Keith Strachan. Who cares that the entire thing is constructed on the flimsiest plot, concerning youthful ambitions in the music business.

The action all takes place in flashback after sexagenarian Bobby (Roger Martin), rooting in his attic with his granddaughter (Chloe Edwards-Wood), comes across, first, his old Dansette record player and then his shining red Fender guitar. The instrument, we later learn, was a gift from dad (Martin again). “Don’t tell mum. She wanted a twin tub.”

By then we are well caught up in the world of Bobby (the excellent Greg Fossard) as a sixth-form schoolboy. He enters a song-writing partnership, competing for a national youth club prize, with the bookish Laura (Hannah Boyce), sister of his best mate Ray (Will Finlason). With so much else on his mind, and especially buxom Sue (Louise Olley), he fails to notice his collaborator’s very obvious crush on him.

Sue, for her part, seems more drawn to the charms of pleased-with-himself rocker Norman (Matthew Colthart, with a perpendicular quiff to put the Fonze’s to shame). His belting performance of Dion’s The Wanderer is a highlight of the show.

All ends happily, of course, with the songwriting prize going in a predictable direction and the youth club rocking to the rafters in a joyous At the Hop, its members fuelled on Vimto, Munchmallows and Jubblys (ah, the period detail!).

Dreamboats and Petticoats
New Theatre, Oxford
Until Saturday
0844 871 3020, or atgtickets.com/oxford