Many stars of comedy famously made their names – or, at any rate, started to make them – in the Cambridge Footlights, among them John Cleese, Sasha Baron Cohen and Stephen Fry. I think it unlikely, however, that any of the new crop of student jokers will follow in these mighty footsteps – not least because they decline to tell audiences what their names are.

Even if they couldn’t manage a proper programme (and why not?), they ought at least to have produced a simple photocopied sheet to introduce the team to audiences arriving at the OFS Studio this week. It can hardly be claimed they haven’t had time, for their hour-long show Wishful Thinking has already enjoyed (they claim) a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Fringe and been seen at three other venues on the ensuing tour.

Perhaps they will manage something before the last Oxford show at 8pm tonight.

As a veteran member of the audience at nearly 40 years of Footlights shows, I have observed over this time a steady dwindling in the quality and invention of what is on offer. Wishful Thinking – though it has its moments – continues the process.

It begins, I fear, with a few minutes of embarrassing and unfunny chat with the audience conducted by a member of the cast who is visually, and aurally, reminiscent of Steve Coogan.

In fact, he goes on to become the stand-out performer among the six players. I particularly enjoyed him as a chap considered so ugly that his cruel friends equip him with warning bell and brown paper balaclava helmet.

Other ‘hit’ sketches include recurring episodes of a spoof TV soap In The Library in which all dramatic business is conducted sotto voce, a clever dialogue between a husband and a wife in which the comic conceit is that he is infuriating her by not being unfaithful, and The Wedding Reception Farce, in which it steadily dawns on an increasingly worried bridegroom that he may be about to tie the knot with a witch.

Best of all, though, is the tale of modern business life in which a passer-by pops into an office to take a leak and ends up being interviewed for – and given – a job. Clearly it was his mastery of the catch-phrase of the moment – “Things are getting pretty hectic” – wot did it.