At the Welling­ton­ista, we love us some live the­atre and com­e­dy. About the only things we love more are bars and hard liquor, so when a PR com­pa­ny offered us some vod­ka to give away as a pro­mo­tion for a com­e­dy show staged in a bar, how could we resist?

As it turns out, quite eas­i­ly. While “Did I Believe It?”, a par­o­dy of 1970s British sci­ence shows, does indeed sound like it could be fun, as some of the more Anglophile Welling­ton­istas point­ed out, it did sound an awful lot like “Look Around You” by the bril­liant Robert Pop­per and Peter Ser­afi­now­icz. An awful lot like it. And you know what? That’s exact­ly what Pop­per and Ser­afi­now­icz thought too.

After first express­ing sur­prise and con­ster­na­tion on Twit­ter, they did the right and prop­er thing: they cre­at­ed a par­o­dy account for Did I Believe It (or at least, we pre­sume it was them). It’s fun­ny, but not quite as ridicu­lous as the real Did I Believe It Twit­ter account, giv­en the lat­ter’s trans­par­ent pro­mo­tion of the spon­sor’s prod­uct. And no inten­tion­al com­e­dy can even come close to the satir­i­cal man­age­ment-speak bril­liance of the show’s own PR:

“We’re real­ly try­ing to rad­i­calise the audi­ence expe­ri­ence. We’re inter­est­ed in shift­ing and chang­ing the para­me­ters of how we tell sto­ries. The ulti­mate take out is [the audi­ence] have a real­ly unex­pect­ed time … Around that time 42 Below were also look­ing to cre­ate some­thing expe­ri­en­tial,” he says of the joint ven­ture.

Retro-com­put­er nerds (or those who are mere­ly old enough and sad enough to actu­al­ly remem­ber it) might also get a laugh out of the exhor­ta­tion to “Pow­er up your over­head pro­jec­tor and flick the switch on your Com­modore 64. Take a trip back to 1978…” Wait: a C64 in 1978?!

Don’t let us put you off: it could very well be a very amus­ing expe­ri­ence. It would just be very nice if they did­n’t blath­er on about how rad­i­cal and orig­i­nal it is to stage a play in a bar (we’ve seen plays in Mighty Mighty, SFBH and the South­ern Cross, among oth­ers). And it would be real­ly, real­ly nice if they gave just a tee­ny bit of acknowl­edge­ment to the peo­ple who have already done the same thing so very very well.