ME baddies, me bairns, he’s back. David Leonard’s vainglorious villain has returned to the York side, so bad news is good news in the Theatre Royal pantoland. Take That may be down to three, but the panto fab four of Kaler, Barrass, Leonard and Cooper is reunited after a two-year hiatus.

Ironically, Old Mother Goose is all about one character: it is known as the dame’s pantomime. You might argue that every Theatre Royal pantomime is Dame Berwick Kaler’s show, but this particular Mother Goose story dates back to 1902 at London’s Drury Lane Theatre, where J. Hickory Wood created a new pantomime for Dan Leno - Berwick’s hero as it happens - giving Leno the biggest ever part for a dame.

Leno changed Mother Goose from a kindly crone to a poor woman who befriends a magical goose that provides her with golden eggs. More than wealth, however, she craves youth and beauty.

Writer Dame Berwick sticks vigorously to this plot, playing up to being 69 by prefixing the title with “Old” and going to maximum, if forlorn measures for his dowager dame, Aggie Goose, to be young and gorgeous once more. It would be much easier to ask Suzy Cooper for her elixir, but more fun to undergo his mega-transformation scene, and what a sight will greet you when he sings Jesse McCartney’s Body Language.

Mother Goose has a strong moral message that beauty and wealth can’t bring happiness. What can bring such happiness, however, is a pantomime restored to full health, now that David Leonard’s disdainful, dashing Dreaded Lurgi is demanding that assorted residents of pantotown Tingly Bottom should look into his magical tail to assist him acquire Matilda the Goose. “I’m above all this,” he says at one point, weary of Martin Barrass’s Barney’s Carrot Song.

Barrass gleefully revives a couple of favourite characters from pantos past; Suzy Cooper’s principal girl Margarine Goosegog – so good you can’t believe she’s not Butter – does a wonderful Dame Berwick impersonation and leads the best routine, a tap-dancing Staying At The Ritz, where ensemble, choreographer Grace Harrington and musical director Elliot Stryche are in tip-top form.

A J Powell’s “luvverly Brummie” is now indispensable to the team too. His Puck, the King of the Fairies, could have stepped out of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, while Tim Lawrence’s Gayelord Tingly Bottom is a fine and dandy principal boy; Pocklington’s Harry Hughes blossoms as boffin Egghead; and Hermione Lynch’s Fairycake Brenda sparkles too.

Add an ABBA song to “King of the Fairies” and “Gayelord”, and Dame Berwick’ 36th panto is even camper than last year’s saucy show. Phil R Daniels and Charles Cusick Smith’s designs dazzle and delight; the water slapstick scene has re-found its splash; the film sequence is a scream; and Kaler and Damian Cruden co-direct with panache and anarchic zest.

One opportunity is missed: more should have been made of York’s Tour de France summer than pictures of two yellow bikes in the Goosegogs’ house, but you can’t have everything in the Kaler, Barrass, Leonard and Cooper’s “restoration” comedy.

Old Mother Goose, York Theatre Royal, until January 31 2015. Box office: 01904 623568 or yorktheatreroyal.co.uk