CLACTON Musical Theatre Society’s Spamalot was a riotous celebration of outrageous silliness of the lowest order from start to finish.

Treading in the mighty footsteps of the Monty Python team is no mean feat, but this show was big on ambition and even bigger on delivery.

There were killer rabbits, no end of gratuitous dancing girls, a fantastic set and, of course, gags galore in a play adapted by Eric Idle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

During the big production numbers, director Paul Welham would have struggled to squeeze more people on to the Princes Theatre stage.

Simon White had an uncanny likeness to the original film’s Graham Chapman as the ridiculous King Arthur.

Keith Sippitt played Patsy and the coconuts with aplomb, and John Roberts, Drew Welham, Samuel Small and David Richardson clearly revelled in their roles as the Knights of the Round Table.

Corrina Wilson shone as the Lady of the Lake, with both a brilliant singing voice and superb comic acting, especially in act two’s Whatever Happened To My Part? and Song That Goes Like This.

Edward Groombridge clearly relished his role as the French guard who taunts Arthur and Co in one of the best-known scenes from the film with the immortal lines “I fart in your general direction” and “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries”.

There is little in the way of plot, which simply acts to stitch a series of silly scenes together, but to give a flavour, the Brits build a huge Trojan horse-style rabbit to get into the French castle but forget to get inside it and are then chased off by the French, who throw animals at them.

The cast had obviously bought into the Monty Python ethic and at times you could almost hear a maniacal John Cleese or gender-crossing Terry Jones amid the madness.

The show had the audience grinning from start to finish in probably the craziest and bravest thing Clacton Musical Theatre Society will ever attempt.

But the risk paid off and the whole show was a visual, musical and comedy feast, beautifully directed and choreographed, and wonderfully acted and sung.

This was seriously silly stuff. Spam never tasted so good.