WHERE will Hull New Theatre's gaudy, gargantuan pantomime fit into Hull, the City of Culture, in 2017?

Very noisily, unashamedly, and not at art's high end, but the show's regular producers, QDOS Entertainment, know how to play to a rowdy crowd who lap up the boisterous, sometimes crude, even coarse fare.

If you're looking for a Chinese village called Won Long Poo, you came to the right place; if you want another joke in poo taste where one Grumbleweed mishears that he has to make a shi* in a bottle, then you're still in the right place.

The Grumbleweeds are now a two-piece of founder Robert Colvill and new addition James Brandon, with Colvill taking over the hapless clown shoes of the late Graham Walker, but the act hasn't freshened up. Playing Sgt Wishee and Washee, they raid the dressing-up box to turn bizarrely into Ali G, Ozzy Osbourne and The Teletubbies, panto pastiches way past their sell-by date. This outdated Grumbleweed act is comedy tumbleweed,

Nigel Ellacott's Widow Conchita Twankey is from the glamorous Danny La Rue school of dame, with a saucy tongue to boot, while Sherrie Hewson takes her day job as a chance to play the Empress Bing-Bong of China as a Loose woman, boozing with the dame and telling a buff young fellow to wait for her. "Don't touch anything; I'll do the touching," she says. Aladdin? A laddish jape, more like.

David Witts, from EastEnders, is a big hit as the Genie of the Lamp; Sam Cassidy's Aladdin, Tara Verloop's Princess Jasmine and James Barron's Abanazar do the straight stuff, and Ian McFarlane's glitzy production is as spectacular as ever, if rough tongued. Glitter on the one hand, but it's all about that base material elsewhere.

Aladdin, Hull New Theatre, until January 4 2015. Box office: 01482 300300 or hullcc.gov.uk/hullnewtheatre