THE title alone is enough to make the characters spring into life. You can hear their voices!

Petulant Queenie, ‘Flash by name, flash by nature’ Lord Flashheart and Nursie complaining about Lord Melchett “letting off such great and fruitsome flappy woof-woofs! One can’t believe one’s tiny nosy”.

And then Blackadder himself: “To you, Baldrick, the Rennaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?”

It’s all grist to the mill for Queen’s Hall Theatre Club, of course, as they prepare for their second outing with Blackadder .

In 2014, the troupe performed the play drawn from the fourth series, Blackadder Goes Forth , set in the First World War.

It was their own way of commemorating the centenary of the outbreak of the war, but they had such fun with it, well... director Moya Holmes said: “We’ve got a lot of Blackadder fans in the ranks. Robin Jowett, who plays Baldrick, knows the scripts off by heart. We had no thoughts of doing them in sequence – mainly because we wanted to do the World War One play in 2014 – but I’m sure we’ll be doing Blackadder III in the future.

“The last one just went down so well with both the audience and the club.”

Peter Kitson, a graduate in performing arts who is a recent addition to the drama group, plays Blackadder himself, Queen Elizabeth High School drama teacher Emily Macdonald is Queenie, Janet Beakes is Nursie and Peter Cooke is Lord Melchett.

Together they will take Hexham back to the Tudor court of Elizabeth I, and Lord Edmund Blackadder’s attempts to win the favour of the temperamental monarch amid a tumultuous mix of botched executions, cross-dressing hopefuls and high adventure on the high seas. And, of course, you never know when to expect the Spanish Inquisition...

Blackadder II will be on at the Queen's Hall on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights this week. Tickets are available now from the box office.