One of comedy’s leading double acts comes to Oxford tonight and tomorrow in the persons of Alexander Armstrong and Ben Miller.

The duo are in the happy position of having a third hit TV series, and at least one sketch creation established as a masterly standard — their “chav” Second World War pilots.

Now they’ve embarked on the task of translating television success to the stage, not having been on the road since 2001. Tickets went on sale a year ago. I asked Ben Miller how long it took to prepare a show on this scale.

“It’s been a couple of years in the making and a huge undertaking; for example, it takes a lot of money to put on a West End-style show with lots of costume changes and sets. It’s an extravaganza! The main thing is to let people in in a way you can’t on TV, although we record all our sketches in front of a live audience.”

One of the costs involved is that, while the ‘favourites’ are in the show, it’s all new material, provided by no fewer than 15 writers. “Most of our shows are written by a handful of writing teams, so Zander and I work closely with individual pairs on the individual sketches; we’ve got about 30 characters in the show, so you do end up clocking up a few writers.”

‘Zander’ is Alexander Armstrong, who Miller has known since just after they both left Cambridge. (Surprisingly, Miller read quantum physics.) They’ve been performing together since 1994.

This tour got off to a bad start, admits Miller ruefully: “We had a rather calamitous beginning in Bristol. I suppose it was partly down to lack of experience, but we made the mistake of inviting the press to that opening night and we had some technical problems; and of course that got interpreted as rustiness on our part. If only they’d known what was happening backstage!”

Let’s see what happens on stage on Thursday and friday.