It’s taken six years, but Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding’s endearingly unlikely double act is finally back where it belongs. Their TV shows — particularly the more fanciful, better realised second series, now playing on Monday nights on BBC Two — did a good job of conveying their bantering blend of the Goodies, Hope and Crosby and Jules Verne. But the blank canvas of the stage gives the thirtysomething duo the best chance to simultaneously depict and debunk their outlandish escapades.

Or it did. Now, though, they have the challenge of unfurling their fantasies in bigger venues, to crowds who greet a TV sidekick such as Naboo the Shaman with all the abandon of a rock audience whooping a hit single. And the Mighty Boosh’s quirks — Fielding’s garrulous narcissism as the indie peacock Vince Noir; Barratt’s lolloping cool as jazz-loving Howard Moon — need to be offset by a solid story to stop their show from eating itself.

But it takes our heroes half an hour to get started. They introduce each other. They chat, they gently spat. They introduce their TV flatmates Bollo the gorilla and Naboo (played by Fielding’s brother Michael). On struts the American comic Rich Fulcher in a powder-blue safari suit then dances to 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday. “This isn’t the show, by the way,” Barratt reassures us with his delicious downbeat timing — which doesn’t make this warm-up any less frustrating.

The show proper, The Ruby of Kukundu, has the boys pitted against Evil Cockney Hitcher (Fielding) in a mock-epic quest to resurrect the slain Naboo. The bursts of song and dance, the wild wigs and kitsch costumes are more like the Boosh of old — so much so, in fact, that longtime fans will recognise whole chunks taken from the Perrier-nominated Arctic Boosh in 1999. But as they travel to Spain, the Arctic tundra and Dalston, the stakes rise, the show wakes up.

There is an inspired hour-long show buried in this sporadically diverting two-hour show. Three nights into a two-month tour, it’s hampered by iffy sound and too many jokes at its own expense. It needs more incident, and more moments of skewwhiff stagecraft such as the fab magic carpets on which the characters come out at the end. If Paul King, the director, can rein the show in, its shambolic absurdity will really delight. For the moment, though, this Boosh is more flighty than mighty.

www.themightyboosh.com