During the first ever People Show interval - Britain's longest-running performance theatre company are breaking the habit of a lifetime in honour of this 40th Birthday Tour - founding member Mark Long told us he knew the secret rationale behind the existence of intervals.

"It's so the audience can leave if they want to," he said. "Because there's nothing worse than being stuck watching a sh***y piece of theatre in a dark auditorium."

Actually, as we'd just discovered, there is something worse - watching a sh***y piece of theatre while wedged painfully between a coach seat and a stranger's groin on a converted tour bus you've waited ten minutes to squeeze on to, causing, by the way, a member of the audience to have a panic attack and one of the People Show "guides" to spark up a supposedly encouraging but in reality supremely irritating cry of "You're the winners, you're the winners!"

There were high hopes of this promenade piece, a reworking of a sell-out show at People Show's Bethnal Green studios last year.

Reviews over the years may've been hit and miss, but then their productions do number an impressive 117. And the latest, 118, was billed as a sort of best-of. As it turns out, People Show don't have enough good ideas to fill five minutes.

Meanwhile the unnecessary transitions between the University's Student Union club, the pimped-up tour bus and the Gardner auditorium were so mismanaged that the opening lines of the third act had to be repeated over and over for 15 minutes while we waited for a third of the audience to return.

Aside from the minimal contributions of old timer George Khan, a brilliant saxophonist with a fascinatingly expressive face, this was an extraordinarily pointless two-hour show which mistook vapid for enigmatic, underwritten for iconic, and sought to win its audience with lazy innuendo and smug, meta-theatrical references to the company's superior integrity.

"People Show don't see a building needing six million worth of work," they declared of the doomed Gardner in the opening act. "We see a blank canvas"

Back on the coach, one of the better imagined characters, Gareth Brierley's road-weary comic, had lambasted those local critics who claim flippantly in reviews to have endured "the worst night of my life". I'm loath to conform to your stereotype, mate, but 118: The Birthday Tour certainly came close.