Hell’s bells. ’Tis the season to be tacky, but this show plumbs new depths of ghastliness. Created by the composer/lyricist Anthony England and writer Roger S. Moss, and directed and choreographed by Gillian Gregory, it is saccharine and slow-moving, its appeal limited to the chance to see TV “stars” in the flesh and glittering like last year’s tarnished tinsel.

England’s anodyne score has all the charm of piped music in a shopping mall, as we journey from the North Pole, where Santa (Roy Barraclough, of Coronation Street) and his elves are hard at work, to the cosy domicile of pigtailed Anna Johnston and her mother Jenny (Joanne Farrell, formerly of Crossroads, so presumably right at home on Alan Miller Bunford’s wobbly cardboard sets). Jenny and Anna are sad, though ever so brave and chirpy, because Mr Johnston died some years before. All Anna wants for Christmas is her daddy back.

Meanwhile, Anita Dobson (EastEnders) as the Ice Queen – a defective toy off Santa’s scrapheap – is out to cancel Christmas and steal a human heart, since the elves neglected to equip her with one of her own. Can Santa’s kindly head elf Joe – Russ Spencer, of the Eurovision hopefuls Scooch – save Yule and make the Johnston family complete again?

Of course he can – but not before we’ve endured two and a half stomach-turning hours of sentimentality and manufactured cheeriness. Girls and boys prance about dressed as beribboned parcels or in manky penguin or polar-bear suits. Gregory’s choreography is a series of variations on walking and standing still. A stableful of flatulent reindeer and a troop of local children lip-synching to a backing track of helium voices are the stuff of festive nightmares.

Dobson’s Ice Queen is a manic cross between the Wicked Witch of the West and Violet Elizabeth Bott. Barraclough is an amiable Santa, while Kim Ismay hoofs and hams it up efficiently as his PA, Ms Drift. Spencer has the antiseptic appeal of a holiday camp entertainer, and indeed the whole enterprise achieves a grim competence. But it’s sickly, mechanical and, like its villainess, it has no heart.

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