A YEAR after Matt Lucas and David Walliams began this mammoth tour, they’ve finally given their nation-conquering grotesques a five-week lap of honour in London. The technical glitches that came with that first night in Portsmouth in October 2005 — and the endearing ad libs that inspired — are long gone. What’s left is a perfectly performed, competently scripted spin-off that sparkles like a West End musical.

Their director, Jeremy Sams, has helped to find a way of giving us an extended TV episode, getting the maximum amount of beloved characters on and off the stage in the minimum amount of time.

So before you have time to think “hold on, that Kenny Craig sketch just trod water very pleasantly for three minutes before petering out” the lights are out, the scenery flies off the stage and the bonkers Tom Baker voiceovers and computer-projected landscapes wham you into the next scene. Carer Lou is outfoxed by the secretly able-bodied Andy; flute-playing hotelier Mr McCoony gets peculiar with a guest; Thai bride Ting Tong offers oral enjoyment to her grouchy spouse — you get what you want every time.

But where this show breathes deepest is when its characters engage with the event. Lucas’s Fat Club fascist Marjorie Dawes pulls a porky up from the audience and good-humouredly humiliates him. Walliams’s disgraced kids’ entertainer Des Kay pulls a fit young lad up from the audience and, er, good-humouredly humiliates him.

So it’s a shame some of the skits are so frugal with the surprises.

We’re resigned to the TV show being the same each week. Here, though, such resolute “giving the people what they want” feels hollow eventually, as if they didn’t trust us to want more than Little Britain the brand.

Still, Lucas and Walliams’s extraordinary comic energy always keeps the show aloft. They still look as if they’re having the time of their lives. Walliams is focused and vibrant, bumping up and down on his butch-camp see-saw within each of his violently fey creations — crap transvestite Emily; poofy politico Sebastian stripping off for Anthony Head’s PM. Lucas is just phenomenal; even gargantuan grotesques such as latex lovely Bubbles De Vere seem utterly real in his hands.

There are a couple of moments when the duo ditch the script to spark off each other. They do this so well that you long for a bit more double-act rough and tumble. Instead the super-savvy staging that makes this show so consumable can also make it bland. It’s never less than amusing, sometimes it’s hilarious. But, on second viewing, Little Britain live is tight, bright but frustratingly light entertainment.

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