Potted Sherlock (Vaudeville Theatre)

It has been almost ten years since Daniel Clarkson and Jefferson Turner potted all of the Harry Potter books into 80 hilarious minutes, since which they have also tackled pirates and panto with their unique style.

Now the affable duo have turned their hands to everything Sherlock, cramming all 60 of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes tales into an hour and a half, with the help of the newest member of their team, Lizzie Wort.

The problem with trying to condense all 60 stories featuring the great detective, by their own admission, is there’s just too much to be able to explore anything in depth, meaning most of the tales get thrown away with cheap gags or asides.

The trio do their best to cram it all in and there are some neat running jokes, including a particularly dastardly (yet tiny) Moriarty – mistakenly entering the fray when someone asks for "More tea" etc – as well as some nice current references and a couple of nods to Steven Moffat’s Sherlock starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

The addition of a third member to the team again makes for a couple of funny moments, and Wort does her best to inject the same silliness as Dan and Jeff to proceedings, but you do wonder if the whole thing would be slicker with just the two at the helm.

Mention must go to Simon Scullion’s impressive set design, Louie Whitemore’s extensive props and costumes, and Phil Innes adds some nice atmospheric music too.

Some of the funniest moments occur when Dan and Jeff (fake?) corpse and go off-piste, improvising around mistakes that are made. There’s no doubt that the Potted pair, along with Clarkson’s co-writer brother Tom, are clued-up Holmes fans, but you get the feeling that to make the most of their subject they should have been a bit more elementary.

Potted Sherlock runs at the Vaudeville Theatre until 11 January 2015