Thirty years – can it really be three decades of laughs from the satirical duo Lip Service? Maggie Fox tells CHARLES HUTCHINSON that it really has been that long.

LIP Service, the satirical duo of Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding from either side of the Pennines, are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year by taking their new show about ageing around the country.

Thirty years, Maggie, thirty years.

“I know, it’s ridiculous really,” says the York actress. “You just think, ‘could you not think of anything else to do?’.” The answer, thankfully, has always been “No”, because the Maggie and Sue double act continues to come up with savvy new ideas.

Latterly, Lip Service have hit on a new formula of utilising a community cast to bolster their shows, first for their Doris Day spoof, Desperate To Be Doris, and now their work on the Wilde side, The Picture Of Doreen Gray, whose 2015 tour visits Harrogate Theatre on February 19 and 20 at 7.30pm.

Placed under their microscope of mirth is the march of time and crow’s feet in a modern culture send-up of Oscar Wilde’s novella and of our increasing, negative obsession with ageing.

Fox’s Doreen is a radio presenter of the Alan Partridge variety, topped off with an Even More 4 television motoring show whose bosses have decided she is a clapped-out old banger ready for the scrapheap at 50. Fox piles up a multitude of characters around her wreckage as Doreen stumbles across a youthful self portrait at a school reunion and makes a dark and dreadful pact with the picture.

Send-ups of washing powder and cream adverts, the Beeb’s Glastonbury coverage, the art world, ghastly school reunions and cookery goddess Mary Berry hit the mark in this romp through some our worst, most shallow characteristics.

“We’ve been having a great time with Doreen Gray since we played the TakeOver Festival at York Theatre Royal last autumn,” says Maggie. “The show has developed and the community choruses who play Doreen’s school mates on stage and on film have been many and varied. We’ve been getting a great response to the show.

“Audiences seem to love the mix of young and old on stage and the pertinent subject of ageing for women as well as the general silliness that people have come to expect of a Lip Service show. Sue and I have had fun adapting the show to the different venues and meeting new friends in our community chorus.”

“General silliness” would neatly sum up Maggie and Sue’s 30-year odyssey, during which they have created 18 original stage plays since founding their ever-resourceful company in 1985.

“We were trying to work out the other day how many hours we must have spent on the road, on a train, in a rehearsal room or on stage,” says Maggie, reflecting on a partnership that had its roots in the Bristol University drama department.

“We hadn’t really come across each other until our third year when we both cast in Ibsen’s The Lady From The Sea. At my height, I’m a dead ringer for Vanessa Redgrave, who’d just done the play at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, where she came on dripping in seaweed. So the image I had was of this queen of drama draped in a hell of a lot of green stuff.

“Anyway, Sue was playing my daughter in the university production, and we were just finding it very funny in rehearsal. The more it went on, the funnier we were finding it, but the others weren’t finding it funny and they weren’t finding it funny that we were finding it funny.

“We were doing that ‘looking into the distance’ acting for Ibsen, draped in seaweed, and it was so liberating to have found someone else who found it funny too, especially when no-one else did.”

Maggie and Sue then did the sound effects for another show, a radio play, to distractingly humorous effect as it turned out.

“We found the audience was watching us rather than the show. The director wasn’t happy,” says Maggie. “All I can remember is doing the noises for the clattering of teacups in the tea room and drowning out everyone else.”

Maggie had been born into a theatrical family: her father was on the board of York Theatre Royal; her uncle was a mainstay of the York Settlement Players.

“I knew I wanted to act; that was what I was going to do, so Sue and I got together and tried to do cabaret, going up to the Edinburgh Fringe, but no women were doing comedy, until Victoria Wood and Julie Walters became the trailblazers, but still the perception was that men were funnier than women,” says Maggie.

Not for long would she and Sue settle for doing “our flopsy bunny act between two aggressive comedians”. Lip Service would change all that.

Box office: 01423 502116 or at harrogatetheatre.co.uk