(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 17 May 2002

MARK LAWSON:
Tim Lott, starting with the songs working out the plot afterwards, it worked for ABBA, does it work for Queen?

TIM LOTT:
I started through most of the first half of this, just squirming in my seat with embarrassment. It was so dreadful. I quite enjoyed the songs, but Ben Elton had clearly knocked it off in a morning on the back of a matchbox.

Then suddenly, either because my nerves had been deadened by it, I don't know, but I was watching these two grannies in front of me, who must have been in their seventies, having a wonderful time. I let go at some point, and started having a really good time.

It picks up at a certain points. There is a scene when they are in Tottenham Court Road station, they had all these kind of characters who are being re-imagined through their dreams as a legend, in that they have a sort of very butch black guy being Britney Spears, which is funny.

I laughed for the first time. With that laugh, I started to enjoy myself. Come the second-half, I was just enjoying it. I put all of my prejudices behind me. I adored it, the second-half.

Come Bohemian Rhapsody towards the end, which they teased you about they weren't actually going to do it, I just, I loved it really.

MARK LAWSON:
What Ben Elton's had to do, it's like a giant cross word puzzle, where he has had to try to work out a plot with these things.

It's fine if the song is called 'I Want To Break Free', but if the song is 'Seven Seas of Rye', he has to pretend that that is what they call a torture chamber, and all that kind of stuff, and it is difficult. A lot of the songs work, a lot of them don't for that reason.

ALLISON PEARSON:
I think that what happened to Tim was that the key moment when his critical faculties fell out of his ears, because the sheer assault, the relentless assault of this pounding music. I thought it was absolute garbage.

It made me angry because you have this show which is a satire on cynicism and on the music business, and "Isn't it dreadful?' and all this synthetic music, then you have these incredibly loud, bombastic anthems of Queen all sounding the same.

Then you go into the foyer in the interval and there is merchandising for sale. What is he satirising here? He has stapled together a few songs. I thought it was implausible.

The Dominion is a huge, echoing stage. The staging was poor and the cast were tremendous but left exposed in this vast, echoing space. No variety in the songs at all.

At one point, it must have been the point when Tim enjoyed it, I thought they should turn around and say, "Sod it and let's do West Side Story ", because there were no tunes.

MARK LAWSON:
Now, I'm with Tim. I thought the scene in Tottenham Court Road was one of the best, one of the biggest laughs in theatre I've heard for years was on the line, "Britney Spears sang to save us ."

There are some fantastic gags in this. Tom Paulin is now going to explain that this is all about the French Republic, and inspired by Milton!

TOM PAULIN:
Not quite! But when I saw it, I arrived at the theatre in an exhausted state and I'd been dreading it because I didn't like Ben Elton's 'Popcorn'.

And then suddenly, 40 years fell away and I was there at the start, y'know, listening to the Beatles and the Stones, and then I thought 'This is wonderful'.

That sixties culture, my generation's culture mixed with Tory anarchism, saying, 'We hate the progress, globalisation, international fast food, climate change, the Channel Tunnel, we are fed up with all of this'.

It was extraordinary the way that it affirmed something that is there in the Star Wars film too, this feeling we all have of post-modern anxiety and damn it, do we want a culture of managerialism to be running us for the rest of our lives?

ALLISON PEARSON:
It's a cynical product. It has been stapled together. It says here "31 of Queen's hits", I mean, 31? It's terrible!

TOM PAULIN:
The audience stood up and it got a standing ovation!

MARK LAWSON:
Let me persuade you of this. There are three or four songs Freddie Mercury wrote when he knew he was going to die. And in fact, when you get those songs in a musical, they give it a greater depth than a lot of musicals do.

ALLISON PEARSON:
I love musicals, musicals are my favourite thing in the whole world. This is not a musical. There is no variety in the songs.

TIM LOTT:
It's not a musical, it's a new breed of musical, it doesn't bother with plot and not very much with dialogue. It's better than going to a Queen concert, which is not saying much!

MARK LAWSON:
We will leave that there.