DENISE Van Outen is the Essex girl you used to know from Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, musicals and TV series and then along came Strictly Come Dancing, as she danced her way to the runner-up’s spot in 2012.

That Saturday peak-time show gives her wings and guaranteed curiosity from an audience keen to see what she does next.

She has teamed up with former Kylie producer, West End vocal arranger and scriptwriter Terry Ronald to write Some Girl I Used To Know, jointly their first play.

Given their musical pedigree, inevitably it features songs, in this case Steve Anderson’s bittersweet torch song reinventions of Eighties and Nineties hits by The Thompson Twins (Hold Me Now), Culture Club (Do You Really Want To Hurt Me) and, best of all, Soft Cell’s Say Hello Wave Goodbye, which both opens and closes the show.

Along with the one original number, the big, ballsy ballad that shares the play’s title, the songs show off Van Outen’s West End and Broadway performing talents to the best, each one drawing a rapturous response from an audience usually to be found at the more brazenly commercial Leeds Grand Theatre.

Van Outen is no stranger to appearing solo on stage, having performed in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black’s one-woman musical Tell Me On A Sunday, but this is a play first, with music for extra oomph.

Ronald and Van Outen are debutant playwrights and Some Girl I Used To Know not surprisingly has that first-time feel to it, sticking to the familiar formula of being both broadly humorous and touching in its story of a 21st century modern woman heading for a midlife overhaul.

Van Outen plays Stephanie Canworth, a lingerie company boss with a supportive husband and a hotline to the media, but alone in her swanky hotel room, it takes only one Facebook poke from schooldays old flame Sean to set memories and temptations alight.

What follows is a series of candid memoirs/confessions of the Stephanie that Stephanie used to know – the girl who partied hard – as the saucy texts from Sean and the unanswered calls from her husband pile up, leaving her wondering where her life stands. The emotions, but not the story, are torn from Van Outen’s back pages.

Thankfully it is better written than last year’s 51 Shades Of Maggie, which Adele Silva steered heroically through its crass, crude platitudes at a sparsely populated York Barbican, but there is a predictable arc to the storytelling and Van Outen’s performance never quite grabs your heart under Michael Howcroft’s proficient, rather than sparkling, direction.

Some of the earthy humour clicks in the style of Amanda Whittington’s Ladies Day; at other times, it is the coarser stuff of the girls’ night out, and ultimately that will be its target audience.

The advance publicity called it a romantic comedy. Not so. It is too bittersweet for that, being a play about when the romance has run out.

Morgan Large’s design captures the anodyne, monochrome glitz of the modern-day hotel room that matches Stephanie’s barren soul. Now she should swap the grey sweatpants for blue or black.

Some Girl I Used To Know, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until Saturday. Box office: 0113 213 7700 or wyp.org.uk