I have the greatest respect for actors. Their ability to take on a completely different persona fills me with awe, especially since I can’t act for toffee. I was invited to the cast party for an amateur production last weekend and I was very relieved no-one suggested charades. That, however, was before I discovered my Inner Babs.

Maybe something’s kicked in from all the plays I’ve seen recently. There was the excellent York Realist, followed by Roald Dahl’s Danny Champion of the World, complete with audience pheasant-beating and, this week, the bonkers bipolar slide into The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Oh, and the daughter’s Youth Theatre show, in which she played Soldier 2 and brandished a fake kalashnikov. (She only had two lines but I still cried.)

That, or it was the white plastic knee-high boots.

Whatever it was (and it definitely wasn’t alcohol, because I don’t drink), I found myself shedding my inhibitions, though fortunately not as literally as the character in Dissocia who loses his along with his trousers and his pants.

I had been invited to a groovy 60s Murder Mystery dinner party to celebrate a friend’s birthday and had been cast in the role of an East End gangster’s moll (‘Ere, ’oo are you callin’ a mole?’) It’s only the second Murder Mystery party I’ve been to, but in the first one I was cast as a Mafioso’s moll. Says something about how my friends see me.

On that note, my first and only solo dramatic role was as Potipher’s wife in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat when I was at university, and she was a tart, too. It was intercut with a filmed sequence in which I had to chase Joseph down Exeter High Street and into a bed shop and the final shot was of me taking a flying leap on top of him as he sprawled helplessly on a king-size divan.

I guess when your only line has been ‘Come and lie with me, love’ (at this point on stage Joseph and I disappeared behind a golfing umbrella and all one could see was flailing legs) it does tend to typecast one.

Anyway, back to the Champagne Murders, an Austin Powers-style gathering of Swinging Sixties icons in which I played ‘Babs Crayfish’, Champagne Charlie’s girlfriend and aspiring actress.

I took this as a nod to the young Barbara Windsor, who was once romantically linked with Reggie Kray, so I hired a psychedelic mini-dress and the aforementioned boots and dug out my white Afro (the costume suggestions were ‘frothy, pink and plastic; bubbly hair’ and you know how I like my wigs).

The format of a Murder Mystery party is that you get bits of scripted dialogue to read out and have instructions to challenge other characters. It’s potentially daunting if you’re not a natural thespian but by the time we’d polished off the canapés, my accent had merged Carry On Camping with full-blown EastEnders and I was having a ball.

I wasn’t the only one to undergo a transformation.  My Charlie was a right smooth geezer with a large wad; a verger became a camp society photographer, a social worker became a top pop singer and a chef was reborn as a flamboyant raconteur and hell-raiser.

I hadn’t realised just how popular these Murder Mystery parties are, but apparently they’re a real cult. Two of our number had been to another Murder Mystery just the night before. On Thursday night I met an academic – let’s call him Gary, since it is his name, though I sense he’s rather attached to one of his Murder Mystery alter egos,  ‘Colonel Hurly Burly’ – who has already hosted four and is planning two more.

Being an academic, he had a theory as to why the games are so popular. ‘You get given a role in a social context and because it’s prescribed for you it’s a licence to be free and explore yourself. You can do it better than in normal life when you don’t know what your role is because it isn’t laid down for you in the same way.’

All I know is that I was supposed to be going vegetarian for the week because (a) it’s National Vegetarian Week and (b) it’s another of my eco-challenges (it’s much more environmentally friendly not to eat meat) but I didn’t think Babs would have had any truck with that. I had to be true to my character so I had the pork chops and the chorizo.

Wotcha mean, I ain’t got no principles? I’ll ’ave you know I bin eatin’ bleedin’ beansprouts ever since. Trouble is, I can’t get rid of this accent. ’Ow do you take it off once you’ve put it on? Ooh, you are awful, I don’t mean like that . . .’