Cheap flights comic show ready for West End take-off

A musical diatribe on the nightmare of budget travel has propelled veteran comedy trio Fascinating Aïda to new heights.

Cheap Flights, which lambasts the likes of Ryanair, has had 7.75 million hits since it was posted on YouTube last year. And the burst of publicity means the group are now enjoying their fastest selling tour in nearly three decades.

Next month they embark on their first major London season since 2003, at the Charing Cross Theatre. But producer David Johnson, from Kentish Town, said he could have sold out the Palladium. "They have always done well but this is something else."

He has no doubts the song is the key. "You only have to listen to the song to realise that everybody has been there."

Dillie Keane, 59, who lives in London and Oxfordshire, founded the company 28 years ago.

She said: "It's rather delightful and of course it's gratifying. It's gone a bit crazy."

She said she had a hunch it could be a hit from the moment she first performed the lyrics: "Cheap flights, cheap flights, we should have gone by sea. There's no such thing as fecking flights for 50p."

"I did it at a couple of parties and got this extraordinary reaction," she said.

So she sank money into a DVD and posted the track online. The public loved it. "It went fungal," she joked.

The consequence is a whole new audience for Keane and her colleagues Adele Anderson and newcomer Sarah-Louise Young who were described by one critic this year as "sharp enough to be considered a dangerous weapon".

"Our audience was getting old. But since the song the audience is getting younger with people in their twenties and thirties and students," she said. I'm afraid I'm going to be doing it for the rest of my life now."

Cheap Flights runs at the Charing Cross Theatre from December 5 until January 11