IT is not every day that you gladly accept the gift of what looks like a nuclear-radiated, peach-coloured woollen quiff to plonk on your head.

For the next two hours, this Elvis woollen wig with bobbing sideburns would take its place among myriad variations on a knitted theme as 52 Elvis devotees – Malton bingo caller Mrs Eileen Boyes among them – were taken not to Graceland, Memphis, but Ian McMillan’s alternative Elvis land in Ryedale on board a Perry’s bus.

As part of the 20th anniversary celebration of Simon Thackray’s arts adventures The Shed, the original Elvis Bus Tour of Ryedale was recreated with Barnsley Bard McMillan as the improvising, tale-spinning tour guide.

Elvis was born in a Malton betting shop… well, no he wasn’t, but this is how this show works, as McMillan responds to the sites and sounds, the sheep, the streets, the fields, that he associates with Elvis’s early years.

Yes it is bonkers, and yes, you had to be there, but if you were there, in Malton, singing Elvis songs to Ilkla Moor Baht’at on the bus; learning of the influence of Pickering on his career; throwing a quiff into the Elvis tree of life at Cropton Brewery; looking for the Elvis-quiffed gazelle; finding a quiff-shaped sculpture at Jennifer Tetlow’s North Yorkshire Open Studos show; and visiting his last resting place in the Lastingham churchyard, where a thistle passed as his monument, then you believed Elvis had indeed been in the building. Just a different one from any that Colonel Parker allowed him to enter.