A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC

New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The below-stairs space wears the heavy oaken lineaments of Victorian piety but the flagstones have been smothered with prim suburban carpeting, wall-to-wall. There’s a bar in one corner. Yes, a bar in a church. With prices high enough to make you take the pledge. The ecclesiastical shelves are crammed with books, magazines, scripts and photographs that summon up the ghosts of our comedy heroes. A big carved pew, centrally plonked, invites the worshipper to sit and read, let us say, the autobiography of Clive Dunn or the diaries of Kenneth Williams.

The sheer incongruity of this arrangement causes palpitations in the brain. A comic reliquary installed beneath a London minster is as weird as a stamp collection entombed in a gasworks or a museum of osteopathy placed on a roundabout or an archive of novelty egg-timers at the North Pole.