OFSTED and the Department for Education please take note. Learning can be great fun in a manner that mountains of SATS tests will never be.

My six-year-old daughter watches Horrible Histories constantly at home, laughing out loud at regular intervals and then informing Daddy of an historical fact I was ignorant of, or was probably never taught.

So, for myself – armed with a B grade in GCSE History – taking in Terry Deary’s Groovy Greeks play proved just as educational and humorous. It certainly beat Mr Crawshaw reading from a text book at the front of our 1980s' classroom. The humour is brilliantly irreverent and madcap, with the Trojan War transformed into a Simpsons episode at one point and some of the comedy violence reminiscent of Reeves & Mortimer.

There’s also a Monty Python feeling about proceedings as a Shopping Channel skit advertises the merits of a whip with “If you can’t beat the price, beat your slave.”

Another scene sees Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes and Socrates debating how to cook a chicken after being transformed into Big Brother contestants and all the action was played out in front of a 3D Bogglevision screen, which had us dodging spears in our seats and swatting away mosquitoes in front of our faces.

I learned, meanwhile, that Thespis was the world’s first actor, hence the word thespian and doctors still take the Hippocratic Oath, named after Hippocrates.

The hospital scene, naturally played out to the Casualty theme, went on to reveal that the first Greek doctors tasted patients’ ear wax, mucus and urine to determine a diagnosis.

They also massaged their survival rates by not letting any dying patients into the building. Just don’t tell our Government about that one!