In 1973, in a tiny room at the top of the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square, eight actors and four musicians set out to have three weeks of fun with a musical featuring a transvestic alien who had decided to build a beautiful creature for his own personal pleasure, all under the guidance and watchful eye of the maverick Australian director Jim Sharman.

This fringe theatre event extended its initial three weeks into a further two weeks of sell-out 62-seat performances, after which it transferred to a cinema down the King’s Road for six months and then to another cinema even further down that same road, where it stayed and played for seven sell-out years.

Since then, it has been produced in more than twenty countries, and the movie, which Jim was allowed to direct and in which we were all allowed to play our original roles, has become the longest-running movie in cinema history. Whatever it is about this work of decidedly low-brow juvenility and populist themes that keeps toes tapping and audiences laughing is not easy to pin down.

It is, of course, a parody of the B movies and science-fiction outings that came out of Hollywood to entertain the ‘ordinary folk’, of whom I was one. It also makes references to people who are little remembered today, such as Steve Reeves, Jeanette Scott, Charles Atlas and Lili St Cyr. One would be forgiven for wondering how that worked as well, but work it did; and now, here we are, more than fifty years later, still having a great deal of fun. Long may it continue to be a celebration of wonderful rainbow joy and toe-tapping happiness.