How they tried! Alexander Armstrong has a great voice and a sexy insouciant presence. Miller is the better ‘actor’ of the two and has the all-round entertainer’s knack of knowing exactly when to wink at the audience.

In a sense, this was an old fashioned variety show, with the hugely popular TV faces fitting themselves on to the New Theatre stage for two evenings last week and giving us their greatest hits. The Sound of Music is to be the theatre’s big Christmas production, but Armstrong and Miller put on a show that was in true pantomimic style — at one point, the two stars were hurling bits of profiterole into the audience.

It’s a case of making commercial hay while the sun shines. The duo opened and closed with their classic wartime RAF pilots, first parachuting down into Oxford and later ascending to Heaven (to discover that God apparently talks in exactly the same chavish fashion as they do). And there was much of the best of the rest of their television sketch successes.

But the demands of a stage show led to some errors. I find the Stone Age grunts in A & M’s TV “Origins of Speech” sketch predictable but funny; their turning it into a musical did not work. Equally, the inevitable destruction of an ancient statue by Miller as museum expert was distinctly average and took up stage time unnecessarily. Their take-off of Flanders and Swann just before the interval was, however, pitch perfect and very funny.

Mention should be made of the talented comedian Katherine Jakeways, who was the only other person to appear on stage apart from the pair’s lugubrious stage manager. Armstrong and Miller worked their socks off (literally: the many costume changes were most expertly and speedily done). They are really talented entertainers as individuals and as a comedic pair of 17 years standing. But I prefer them on the box.