Billed as an informal "an audience with" style Q&A, An Evening With Vic & Bob was far more interesting than that. It was also relentlessly hilarious, which shouldn't be much of a surprise. No, the really surprising thing was how overwhelmingly joyful it was.
Sitting amid a confusion of detritus from more than three decades of success, Reeves and Mortimer obviously look considerably older than the two lads who exploded on to our screens with Big Night Out in the late eighties. In every other way, however, they are entirely the same. Their beautifully bizarre mixture of traditional vaudeville, slapstick, skewed pop culture and searing blasts of surrealism was served at exactly the blend and strength that made us love them from the start.
This was a more relaxed affair than their usual big productions but, if anything, all the more effective for it.
On the first night of an exceedingly short tour - six sold-out dates in just five locations - the inevitable rough edges added to the charm. With no interviewer, the duo relied on Twitter-garnered audience questions and, far more entertainingly, ludicrous questions they'd devised ("This is a bit ponderous, isn't it?...Do you like the Twitter questions?" Bob asked the audience as he struggled with his phone - you could tell he was happier asking Vic: "Would shopping in Sports Direct be improved if they sold fresh meat?").
There was a framework of sorts, with photos of the pair tracing their journey from childhood to the present. But the anecdotes ranged from the obviously fictitious - one ended with Pointless host Alexander Armstrong's car growing a beard - to the frankly weird. Why has Vic Reeves apparently devoted his life to closing down swimming pools and international sporting events? I've no idea but he's adamant he has.
The Stotts, Mulligan and O'Hare, The Man With The Stick, Chris and Carl from Catterick, Lovejoy, the Bra Men, Councillors Cox and Evans, Tom Fun and Derek... the duo slipped into character after character, deliberately tripping each other up with outrageous improvisations that often ended with them laughing nearly as loud as the audience.
There was even the odd bit of news - they said they would be revisiting the world of their favourite project - the brilliant Catterick - in a film. I hope they weren't making that up. It was hard to tell.
I don't know if Vic and Bob are mad or not. They might well be. But they look well on it and they're great value. No current comedy double act is as weird, but none spreads so much happiness.
An evening with them is the best time you can have.
Get the most important news straight in your inbox before 9am every day - sign up to Nottinghamshire Live's newsletter. No complicated forms to fill out, just enter your email address in the black box at the top of this page.
