EACH week, Bob and Terry meet at the club to discuss John, Paul, George and Ringo and The Likely Lads, the original Bob and Terry.

Today, however, is different. Bob (Robert Angell) and Terry (Robert Took) are wearing dark glasses in the rain in Terry’s run-down car, looking furtive, nervous and egging each other on. Are they on the cusp of carrying out a burglary?

Wrong! Bob and Terry are about to attend the Buggy Boogie, all part of being unlikely new dads in middle age in the small village of Stoney, home to the Old Stoney Brewery.

Green Hammerton company Badapple Theatre are off on their latest rural tour of village halls for 35 performances of artistic director Kate Bramley’s quirky comic tale of two friends for 28 years suddenly startled from their comfort zone.

Bramley writes with typical economy, astute cultural observation, generous humanity and comic awareness as she throws her protagonists into new, unfamiliar situations, just as she did in her bracing brace of Landgirls plays, and she is aided greatly by Catherine Dawn’s ingenious fold-out set. The flat-pack car even has a door that closes again as it is folded away.

Bramley’s storytelling is as brisk as the scene changes as company regular Angell forms an instant bond with Welshman Took, a new signing with bags of Northern Broadsides experience.

There is a sitcom style to the comic repercussions that harks back to the fractious friction of The Likely Lads, but here everything is seen through the lads’ eyes only, adding humour when they mimic the absent women of the story that have left the lads holding the babies (represented by prams and recorded cries).

Physical humour abounds, be it Terry in goggles and diving attire mistaking “baby scuba” for “aqua zumba” or the dads re-enacting the heroic act of changing smelly nappies to The A-Team theme tune.

To add to the enjoyment, Jez Lowe has recorded new versions of familiar songs with ‘baby’ in the title, never better than when Angell and Took do a dads’ dance to a flamenco I Got You Babe.

The Unlikely Dads, Badapple Theatre On Your Doorstep, doorstepping until May 31. Box office and tour itinerary: badappletheatre.com