With Impromime, our December 2002 show at the ADC theatre in Cambridge, we started with the premise of a traditional English pantomime - heroes and villains, songs and slapstick, and so forth - and then let our normal improvisation process take over. Despite such a rich set of conventions and stereotypes, we rapidly discovered in rehearsal that the constraints imposed still allow for a huge amount of flexibility, and by the time we got to the performances we had already had pantomimes in modern-day England, deep underground in the Rat Kingdom, and in outer space.

In front of an audience, we had a vampire dentist, a hero with hairy toes, Margaret Thatcher cutting down the forests and introducing conscription, and a machine that turned orphans into gold. And positively no pirates.