Had I left at the interval, as a less dedicated critic might easily have done, I would have missed much the best part of the show. Worse, though, I would have departed in the erroneous belief that the home side had been soundly beaten by the Cambridge Footlights in this annual battle between the wise-cracking wags of the two universities. With no clue provided in the programme, by means of a spoken introduction or, indeed, in the comedy routines themselves, I judged that Oxford were kicking off proceedings. Good manners, surely, where one is playing host. And besides, why else had those huge pictures of city scenery - including the Sheldonian and Hertford's Bridge of Sighs - been placed behind the performers?

In fact - as became clear by a process of elimination later - it was the evening's third team of comedians, from Durham University, who had been given the task of warming up the packed Playhouse crowd. Primed for laughter though the audience clearly was, there was very little to inspire it here. A series of unmemorable sketches raised barely a titter.

Happily, Cambridge - prefacing their routines with an identity-providing reference to East Anglia - did much better. Their star (no names supplied) was a tall, thin, serious-looking chap who earned the evening's loudest laughs thus far with a mock-academic address concerning a dictionary, read as if it were a novel. Ditto a thesaurus, "with even more words".

But for comic inspiration this was easily outclassed by the series of well-honed sketches, delivered by the five-strong Oxford Revue to the delight of the approving home crowd. True, there was more than a touch of Monty Python about some of them, but there was no doubting the flair in both writing and performance. There was a splendid cod-Shakespearian scene in which a Richard III-like king recited, in the hammiest thespian tones, a series of popular modern ditties beginning with Pinocchio's "I Have No Strings to Tie Me Down". I much enjoyed, too, the rabidly anti-English attitudes revealed by Natalie Dibsdale's Welsh schoolteacher.