You’d have thought Talent would have been in with a fighting chance. It’s directed by its writer, the multi-talented Victoria Wood and this award-winning 1978 “comedy with songs” saw the beginning of Wood’s long and fruitful screen collaboration with Julie Walters when it was filmed for television a year later.

Dispiritingly, the bewilderingly few laughs Wood squeezes from her slightly reworked script come when we take it on trust that the decade of the Seventies itself — the Lurex, the sideburns, the Babycham — was funny.

It’s amateur talent night at “Manchester’s premier entertainment venue”, and Julie (Leanne Rowe), a would-be singer, has something of a past and Maureen (Suzie Toase), her plump friend, has a Kit Kat in her handbag. Perhaps one-night stands, sexual predators and teenage pregnancy had more dramatic clout three decades ago but their characters and back-stories seem poorly fleshed out now and everyone around them is a music-hall twerp. Noël Coward was mocking these kinds of desperate variety acts back in 1935.

The tone, not to mention send-ups of Larry Grayson-style campness, lurches between laboured and desperate as Maureen, looking discomfitingly like a 1940s evacuee, helps Julie get ready backstage. Rowe has a tough night of it but Toase is, mercifully, better value. A range of lively expressions draw our attention to her round face while she sits in the corner, letting the pretty one hog the limelight. Even so, this is no talent show winner.
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