As we opened to Mattie Wnek entering a history-teaching-cum-mind-reading-time-machine, I began to worry that this year’s Spring Revue might have fallen into the trap of being too clever for its own good. Thankfully, The History of Everything was pitched just right. Despite a slightly shaky starting premise, the concept itself proved a comic goldmine, occasionally resulting in historical satire of Python-esque proportions.

Part of the pleasure of the show was its doing what it said on the tin. We were taken from Jurassic prehistory through to the year ‘TED’, with the year beamed up overhead: which, as in the case of 1984, was part of the punchline itself, but which most of the time helped to keep the audience on the same page when costumes/accents got a bit hazy. (Though for the most part they didn’t). The humour ranged from the searingly witty through to appalling Dad jokes so bad they were good. While many gags relied on wry twists on historical events (the invention of the wheel, Noah’s ark – you get the idea), others were utterly off the wall: most memorable was Alex MacKeith’s spectacular physical comedy as a teenage dinosaur being put through finishing school by Jamie Fraser.

The tour was truly whistle-stop. At times, this meant scenes which seemed to have potential were abruptly cut short. At others, punchlines eluded the audience. One particular scene that featured the recurring trope of a banana-crazed loon (James Bloor) running across the stage seemed a missed opportunity for a joke about lemurs (see it and you’ll get what I mean). Occasionally, missed punchlines were a tech issue, though this didn’t prevent the fog of awkwardness from descending upon cast and audience alike when punchlines misfired.

Generally, however, the show benefited from its variety: we were given a huge generic mixture ranging from rap (after seeing Dümpf, I can safely say that Archie Henderson has a gift) to three-second one-liners. One particularly scene that had me crying with laughterin my seat involved Ben Pope and Ryan Ammar as eighteenth-century aristocrats whose epistolary courtship is sabotaged by angry and illiterate heralds. This could be a sad reflection on the sophistication of my humour, but the jokes about poo and silly accents really got me.

Elsewhere, however, sitting ducks made the worst targets: a scene featuring MacKeith as George W. Bush fell surprisingly flat, perhaps for the facileness of taking the piss out of the century’s greatest laughing stock. Yet there were also problems when the jokes swung towards obscurity. We began to fall off this precipice towards the end, as the show voyaged into the future and began clutching at teleportation-shaped straws. But it would seem unfair to discredit the Revue for its sharp final downturn. Overall, the Footlights brought the goods: The History of Everything wasn’t tricksy or overcomplicated. It hunkered down and built some original comedy on top of a rock-solid concept. Yes, it had a slightly damp ending: but for a few hundred million years it was bloody great.