Title: Doctor What and the Return of The Garlics
Starring: The Chuckle Brothers
Venue: Various UK Venues
Dates: From March 1st - December 20th 2006


It seems wholly appropriate that I am writing this review now, before I see the production to which it refers. Before you consider this aged critic to have taken leave of his senses, allow me to explain. I have an advantage over my readership: I have recently travelled in time - travelled back to the 27th of January in the year 2006 (or 'today', as you slaves to the god of Greenwich Mean Time like to call it). Apt indeed, for the production in question can trace its lineage right back to the most famous time traveller of them all, Doctor Who.

There have been several incarnations of Gallifrey's greatest export but none can compare with happy gurner (and dirty paedophile - Ed) Barry Chuckle. Chuckle materialises on the stage with a face like an inside-out Hitler mask, eyes like putrid oysters wallowing in sockets full of gin and an outfit to have Rupert Bear pointing and laughing. It's true that none of our ten Whos would have been a friend of Trinny and Susannah, but as Chuckle bounds around the stage firing off sterile aromatic-bulb-based quips like a broken minigun or a UNIT machine gun loaded with a blank magazine, it becomes clear he has taken the Doctor's eccentric sense of fashion to another dimension. Clad in clown shoes, a garish stripy jumper and red overalls, one wonders if Chuckle has not escaped from the 'mental wing' of some freakish penitentiary run by Geoffrey from Rainbow, Timothy Mallard and other celebrity child molesters.

Accompanying Chuckle's highly distressing Doctor What on his adventures through time is faithful, mountainous tin cat, K2, played with staggering ineptitude by brother Paul. Shod in white fur boots, dressed in nothing more than a stainless steel collar and graduating from the George Galloway school of frightening feline apery, Chuckle Junior sashays across the stage on all fours stuttering "Affirmative, master" in the least credible robot voice since Stephen Hawking.

If you find it difficult to imagine anything more unsettling than that image then I recommend you pick up a ticket for Doctor What and the Return of The Garlics immediately. Some time after the interval you will have the opportunity to reinvent your own imagination, providing you can keep your eyes open throughout the scene where K2 pan fries garlic using the "laser, heat spike" which appears from between his legs. I had hitherto clung to the misconception that Paul Chuckle was some kind of asexual being from the seventh circle of Hell. However, as he proudly unfurls several inches of genitalia from somewhere within his naked body, lovingly wraps this beast pipe in bacofoil and 'fires' it at a head of garlic, one is forced to re-evaluate, and face the horrific truth that this creature is indeed capable of reproduction.

In case you were wondering how any production could follow the sight of a grown man waving his tinfoil-clad penis over a pan full of perennial food plant, the answer is this.

Doctor: Ah, I love the smell of garlic first thing in the morning, K2. How about you?

K2: Affirmative, Doctor.

Doctor: This is the end...beautiful friend.

K2: Affirmative. The End. Meeeow.

This exchange, a baffling nod to Coppola's Apocalypse Now, does indeed represent the finale of the boy's galactic adventure, as they step back into the TARPISS, a giant motorway SOS phone, and dematerialise.

The greatest fear of every critic's career is that the curtain will go up on a production which transcends words, which defies a written summation, which strains at the inadequate manacles of our language until it breaks free and vanishes over the horizon to frolic in an uncharted realm somewhere beyond mortal comprehension. As the house lights go up on Qdos Entertainment's production of Doctor What and the Return of The Garlics, and the sound of absolute truth rings clearly from the public address system (the Chuckles singing "Silly me, silly you, we can always find something better to dooo"), one is left with the dreadful realisation that that day has finally arrived.

Hell rape die pleaseee ghnnnnnnrnrrhrrghh burn sack fuck cunt jesus kilL death mrudereraafagasfagsfasgasfgafs!!!!!!

Try as I might, my words can no more do justice to this bum guff of a production than I can prevent the planet from spinning and make time stand still. And, as the latter, too, is beyond me, nothing can prevent my body following its destiny in this timeline: in 34 days time I will catch the 14:24 from London Euston to Oxford, where I will hail a taxi cabriolet from outside the central station and be ferried to the Queens Theatre, Hanwell Street. I will take my place in the stalls, row C, seat 12, and experience, once again, the Chuckle Brother's production of Doctor What and the Return of The Garlics. I implore you, do not see this review as a piece of theatre criticism, for it must fall short of such a description. Please, please, please consider it my suicide note.

The horror!