Enough already. In a week when we have had Bob Dylan spilling out of every nook and cranny of the media, there was not enough room for the Bobophiles to fit it all in. Several performers at this Dylan tribute concert at the Barbican on Monday night could not resist telling the audience that they were missing one hell of a TV programme, referring, of course, to the first part of Martin Scorsese’s much-hyped BBC rockumentary No Direction Home.

As with everything to do with Dylan these days, there was a hushed, devotional air to the presentation. There were readings from the scriptures — Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles — and rheumy-eyed musings from a succession of old-timers such as Martin Carthy and Liam Clancy, folk singers whose paths had crossed Dylan’s back in the dim and distant days of the 1960s.

“Bob came into my life when I was 14 years old,” confessed Billy Bragg, who started, finished and hosted the four-hour show without once missing a beat. At least he managed to crack a few jokes about it, even if his stolid, English yeoman’s delivery of Dylan’s quintessentially American folk music jarred somewhat.

Odetta, the singer who influenced Dylan when he first arrived in New York City, sat beside the piano and fed the tune of Mr Tambourine Man through the gospel wringer. Now 74, her magisterial presence and beatific smile carried all before her.

Meanwhile, Like A Rolling Stone had been entrusted to the cabaret stylist Barb Jungr, who made a typically extravagant meal of it.

Although a thoughtful and well-meaning programme which placed Dylan’s achievements in a historical context, it was all desperately earnest and reverential. And, my God, it went on.

Roy Harper strayed endearingly off message, delivering a tribute to the England cricket team in the shape of his maundering ballad When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease, while it took Robyn Hitchcock to remind us that, despite the valedictory tone of the event and its overwhelming focus on events of 40 years ago, or more, Dylan is actually still alive and walking the same earth as us mere mortals.

Willy Mason, one of the few Americans on the bill and the only one, by a long chalk, yet to reach 21, mumbled and stumbled through Only a Pawn in their Game. KT Tunstall made a much better fist of Tangled Up In Blue, before wrapping up the show with Bragg on a duet of This Wheel’s on Fire. And then it was back home on the last train to check that the video recorders had all worked as planned.