The Cambridge Footlights, the university’s comedy club, has not greatly altered its modus operandi since its first production in 1883. During termtime, the club puts on sketch shows and a pantomime, as well as regular ‘smokers’, low-stakes concerts for trying out material. The Footlights Revue is staged every summer in May Week (held, confusingly, in June), often with a self-­consciously silly title such as A Clump of Plinths, Rainbow Stranglers or Some Wood and a Pie. It then tours (there may be an Edinburgh and a West End run) and, sometimes, makes stars of its stars.

Famous Footlights graduates include two of the Beyond the Fringe quartet (Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller), three Pythons (John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle), all the Goodies, two Inbetweeners and actors such as Emma Thompson, Nicola Walker and Tom Hollander. The Footlights is where Fry met Laurie, Mel met Sue, Armstrong met Miller, Mitchell met Webb and Tom Basden met Tim Key (who pretended to be a PhD student in order to take part). One pleasure of Robert Sellers’s likeable history, though, is learning of the more surprising members. The novelist Malcolm Lowry, we are told, was a wizard at the ukulele. A future attorney general, Peter Rawlinson, dressed in drag to play the wife of Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter Ronald Millar. The newsreader Richard Baker played the piano. University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne wrote and directed the 1957 revue, Share My Lettuce. The novelist Ali Smith co-wrote and co-directed the first all-female review, Daughters of England, in 1989.

The impact of the Footlights on British comedy is testament to a reasonably open auditions policy, the intense bubble of university life (in ‘three years of three eight-week terms you go through about six lifetimes’, says Clive Anderson) and the simple fact of contiguity. Many fruitful comedy partnerships were formed