WOOL plays a very big part in LipService Theatre’s Swedish crime thriller Inspector Norse.

The set is knitted. The props are knitted. The costumes are knitted.

The blood, entrails and road kill are – wait for it – knitted.

Comedy duo Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding play all the parts, and provide the sound effects.

The opening scene involves Maggie using knitted figures on sticks to act out a murder scene while Sue provides the sound effects, eating ‘authentic Swedish crisp breads’ to make the sound of footsteps in the snow.

And then the oddball Inspector Larsson and her sidekick set off to solve the various murders/disappearances of members of the glampop group Fabba, who went platinum in the 1970s with hits such as Portaloo! (Need a wee badly, but there’s queue).

Fox and Ryding are eminently likeable, and the show is a gentle, meandering journey into the surreal with moments of pure sitcom and some wonderfully cringe-worthy puns thrown in, but it does lose its way a bit in the middle.

There’s a strange video tribute to the contributing knitters (who did do a fabulous job, it has to be said) and some rather laboured jokes involving moose that it could have done without.

But then it rallies again at the end for “the biggest knitted fireworks display you have ever seen”.

Morwenna Blake