The warm-up scene of Dud & Pete: Come Again, a tribute to fondly-remembered comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, was promising, setting up a TV set with actors, radio engineers and whatnot wandering about measuring angles, adjusting furniture, vaguely dusting a grand piano. Sadly, that's about as good as it got. We were to witness the Tony Ferguson Show, introduced by the man himself (Alexander Kirk) in a desperate Archie Rice-type attempt to get us interested and applauding before launching into an interview with Moore.

Writers Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde let themselves and us into a bewildering triple time-scale: the ghastly showbiz chatshow set quite precisely in 1982; the sketches from Beyond the Fringe (1960, pictured right) and other shows; and the backstage chat, foul-ups and imagined conversations between Cook and Moore extending into the 1990s. The hapless Kirk was doomed to sit mute and immobile in his TV set while most of the action took place downstage. It included a few allusions and mercifully even fewer excerpts from Dud and Pete's later very nasty personae, Derek and Clive.

From the earlier Fringe years we briefly saw William Belchambers, showing the febrile energy of Jonathan Miller, and Philip Langhorne with Alan Bennett's flat vowels and cardie. The two principals recalled (rather distantly) their great predecessors. Simon Lowe was a versatile Dud, who played the piano competently but giggled a lot (surely not authentic?). Gareth Tunley had something of the cool insolent assurance of Cook, lounging languidly with what a thesp friend called the tragic knee', slightly bent. He had some of the best one-liners - David Frost described as the bubonic plagiarist' among them - but often gabbles them.

The final scenes showed Cook's wretched alcoholic decline and the irreparable split of the partnership. As they sang "It's time to say goodbye", we might perhaps have raised a glass or doffed our cloth caps to Dud and Pete, and been glad to remember the survivors Miller and Bennett still variously enriching our lives.