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With a distinctive nasal twang, the locals pepper their conversations with “crikey,” “sprog,” “yobbo,” “tinny,” “chunder,” “togs” and “hard yakka.”

And so it ended up that the public address wound up playing a merry “Down Under” after the whistle, even if it did feel odd to sit in a country mostly dry and ponder the lyric “where beer does flow and men chunder.”

“Better not have another one, I might chunder on the train.”

“They make me want to chunder. Give me real people. Give me people who can move their faces. Give me people that have views and opinions.”

Its most fully imagined characters are conspicuously all non-English and ethnically and religiously diverse: the Irish Catholic hero, the Pathan horse-dealer Mahbub Ali, an elderly upper-class lady from the North-West provinces, the Bengali spy Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and, not least, a Tibetan lama.