Sir Trevor McDonald electrocuted, Mahatma Gandhi’s picture used instead of Rishi Sunak’s and a computer algorithm falsely reporting that the Pope has been assassinated.

This was the car crash launch of a new TV news service - but then it was secretly owned by the North Korean dictatorship.

This was the story told in the new stage production of the nineties TV newsroom comedy Drop the Dead Donkey, which is showing at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury until Saturday.

Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening has members of the original cast. Their characters are brought back together after 26 years in a just-launched TV news company Truth News, in place of the original Globelink News.

This is an exceptionally good show, reaching the same high standard as the award-winning TV series. The underlying moral is always how not to run a newsroom.

The actors fit perfectly back into their eccentric characters and the script has the same wonderfully barbed humour as before.

There is the shallow and ill-informed co-anchor Sally Smedley (Victoria Wicks) calling the Chinese president Xi Jinping “President 11.”

Field reporter Damien Day (Stephen Tompkinson) was up to his old tricks. In the nineties, he planted the same child’s teddy bear in different war and disaster zones to exaggerate and misrepresent stories.

Now he arrived in a wheelchair claiming he was maimed while war reporting. He was miraculously on his feet when making an impassioned speech towards the end of the show.

He boasted that he practised fake news long before the term was coined.

The original series would be recorded a week to a few hours before transmission so that each edition could be right up to date with current events.

Three decades on, instead of references to John Major and Bill Clinton, the names of Sunak and Joe Biden regularly came up - and Donald Trump.

The deputy sub-editor Dave Charnley (Neil Pearson) remarked: “If Trump goes to prison and wears an orange jumpsuit….”

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage isn’t spared, with a joke that he complained his voters need bigger polling booths to make space for their mobility scooters and pit bull terriers.

The script is again peppered with references to current events.

For example the assistant editor Helen Cooper (Ingrid Lacey) asked why the infected blood scandal had been ignored for so long and Dave replies: “ITV didn’t make a drama out of it.”

Legendary TV newsreader Sir Trevor McDonald made a filmed cameo appearance and was injured in the storyline by an electric shock due to a technical foul-up.

Angry tweets from the public poured in as the debacle of the first broadcast continued and one said: “WTF, they’ve zapped Sir Trevor.”

Chief executive Gus Hedges (Robert Duncan), famous for his opaque managerial babble, gave this a hamfisted positive spin: “We’ve plugged a national treasure into the mains.”

The story ends with the news service closing down and the characters going back to their separate lives.

The original Drop the Dead Donkey was broadcast on Channel 4 from 1990 to 1998.

The show was awarded the Best Comedy (Programme or Series) Award at the 1994 BAFTA Awards and the original writers, Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, also wrote this stage version.

The saddest moment of this production was right at the end with black and white photographs shown of two of the original cast no longer with us.

David Swift was the wonderfully hot-tempered veteran journalist Henry Davenport. He died from complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2016, aged 85.

Haydn Gwynne was the assistant editor Alex Pates in the first two series.

She died last October, aged 66, just a month after being diagnosed with cancer.

Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening debuted at The Marlowe Theatre at The Friars, Canterbury yesterday (Tuesday) and finishes there on Saturday, June 15,

Tickets cost from £24 to £62 and can be bought here.

Remaining performances are 2.30pm and 7.30pm Wednesday, June 12: 2.30pm and 7.30pm Thursday, June 13: 7.30pm Friday, June 15 and 2.30pm and 7.30pm.