One entire hour a day devoted to women? Luxury indeed. That’s the message Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole took to heart when they, in the space of about two weeks, set about putting together their own version of Woman’s Hour. The result is an eclectic explosion of deathly funny comedy, chilling cabaret, singing shouting spectacular. “The ridiculousness of trying to write a show about women, trying to sum up the experiences of all women in every country, everywhere in an hour precludes the ludicrous nature of the show itself.”

The show, which graced Cambridge Junction on Wednesday, sends up issues as diverse as the tampon tax, porn, periods, and children’s advertising. Barely any aspects of ‘womanhood’ are left untouched by this boisterous duo, who met at Queen Mary University of London and collaborate together for company Sh!t Theatre. Their previous show, ‘Guinea Pigs on Trial’, exploring the dark world of the pharmaceutical industry, was shortlisted for Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Award in 2014. After rave reviews at the Edinburgh Festival last year, they’ve made a break from their tour to take part in Cambridge’s Women of the World Festival, taking place throughout this week and over the weekend, culminating in the International Women’s Day celebrations on Tuesday 8th March.

Though sharing a title with the BBC Radio 4 programme, and occasionally drawing from its format, Louise and Rebecca say their version “doesn’t so much make fun – it’s definitely done with love.” The pair were even snuck inside the Woman’s Hour studio by a friend who works on the show, and BBC presenters came to watch them on tour to make sure it wasn’t offensive. Apparently, it’s just one vowel – Women’s, rather than Woman’s – that stops the pair from being sued. It deals with the light – one of the songs, ‘Talk Dirty To Me’, describes in detail the everyday human processes of, er, excrement, as well as the dark. “We also do a song which is based on online hate comments, mostly from #gamergate on Twitter but also taken from YouTube comments on Lena Dunham’s videos. That’s stuff that’s online already, which is very violent and dark, and lots of use of c-words and rape images… during those bits, people don’t laugh. People were asking us whether those comments are real, because they get so violent. But this can be found through 10 minutes of easy research on Twitter.” But in reality, it’s not as if the ‘funnier’ bits of the show are any less innocent. In fact, according to Rebecca and Louise, it’s the most ridiculous aspects of sexism and gender that they encounter that are the funniest: “stuff like the newly gendered Kinder eggs that started bringing out year. Why would they bring that out? What’s the need for gendered kinder eggs in 2016 when normal kinder eggs have been totally fine for the last 50 years?”

Does the show have any particular party political leaning? “Although obviously we get more lefty people coming to see it, we take the piss out of both left wing and right wing in the show”. Even the Guardian newspaper isn’t free from a blast of their humour: Louise and Rebecca scoff as they tell me how they send up an article discussing the sexualisation of female murderers for “the way they tiptoe around gender”. On the other side, scorn is particular reserved for George Osborne’s “incredibly public schoolboy nod to women” over the tampon tax, referring in this case to his decision in November last year to reroute the £15 million raised a year from the tax to support women’s domestic violence charities.

Despite the fact that the majority of domestic violence is committed by men, “it means a view of domestic violence as just a women’s issue… paid for by a tax on women”. The show, then, tries to highlight “the sorts of people that could be doing more” to reduce gender inequality – and, in some cases, that means the government. But it’s not that simple: “it’s a 4,000-year-old problem. Women have been second-class citizens pretty much since the dawn of time. We don’t so much seek to blame, but highlight the forces that participate in the patriarchy.”

Rebecca and Louise have boundless energy, bullishness and no shortage of material to get riled up about. Their approach, which they chart to the influence of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, two performance artists of the 1980s feminist movement in New York, is “just fucking do it. The idea is to make art “without access to money, to completely do it yourself. If there’s some point you want to make, just fucking doing it.” And that, it seems, is a good way to sum up Women’s Hour.

The Women of The World Festival kicks off this Saturday with a day of talks, workshops, performances and debates at Cambridge Junction to celerate women and girls. First held in London, it has now spread around the world to places such as, Sydney, Hong Kong, Egypt, Ethiopia – and Cambridge!