As middle-aged insurance man Tubby Baker hears, for the first time in decades, the record on which he sang with Manchester School Children’s Choir in 1929, a look of bewildered sorrow crosses his face. We read every dewy-eyed twitch and gape in the face of Tubby (Vincent Franklin) for it is projected huge upon a screen filling the backdrop.

So, minutes into this new work written and directed by Victoria Wood (not a musical, but a play with songs, she says) we know this is about missed opportunities, lives unfulfilled and a striving to re-connect with the blithe optimism of youth – a time when Tubby was a cheery lad, even in spite of a mother who forbade him to join the choir for the famous recording of Purcell’s Nymphs And Shepherds at the Free Trade Hall.

Now, as the action begins in 1969 with a TV documentary being made to mark the 40th anniversary of the recording, we discover that Tubby stayed with that joyless mother until her recent death, just as Enid Sutcliffe (Jenna Russell), another young chorister, has lived a similarly dull and uneventful life. If these blighted dreams are the dramatic bones, the flesh of the play is Wood’s hilarious evocation of 1969, with bucket loads of bathos and a list of period brand names which runs from Ajax to Wimpy.

This is not the 1960s of Woodstock, flower power and the permissive society. It is the 1960s of suburban snobbery – embodied by puffed-up businessman Frank Brierley (Gerard Horan) - sexual repression and a dread of decimalisation. It is a world in which Tubby and Enid go “middle-aged and buttoned-up” to the Golden Egg. When Frank and his wife Dorothy take the couple to a Berni Inn restaurant - a musical sequence which is one of the show’s highlights - it is “to demonstrate the life you missed”.

Interspersed with Tubby and Enid’s emotional re-awakening, we see the children 40 years before, rehearsing and then recording that famous record, with pupils from Manchester schools (Pike Fold and Bowker Vale primaries, plus the Co-operative Academy of Manchester on the opening night) making up the choir.

So Tubby is able to dance and sing with his younger self, appealingly played by Raif Clarke. Typical of Wood, we get characters who can argue the distinction between nibbles, snacks and light repast, but are tongue-tied over the big issues. The details are delicious: the Peach Pretence lipstick insisted upon by Dorothy (actress Lorraine Bruce, who is also scene-stealingly superb as the blowsy secretary Pauline), the brownish settees, the perceived sophistication of “plating up the Matchmakers” for guests, the belief that you are “continental” because you've got a continental quilt, Enid’s insistence that there is a world of difference between a secretary and PA to the managing director (that difference, we later discover being “a leatherette planning diary and an intercom”).

This is very much a Manchester tale. Pictures of the city in the 1960s flash up on that backdrop. A picnic in Piccadilly Gardens expands into a Fred and Ginger-style dance number.

But the story is universal in its appeal. If there is an inevitability about its destination, it is a real joy getting there, particularly for those old enough to recall when the height of sophistication really was a Black Forest gateau in a Berni Inn.

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