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graduated; only Rob, Charlie and Tristram were still around, so Matthew Holness and I were quickly co-opted to organise smokers, reel in freshers and hold panto auditions. I realised how green Rob must have been feeling when I’d met him at the Cinderella recall audition a year before, and had an important epiphany: ‘knowing what you’re doing’ largely involves pretending to know what you’re doing. Or, at least, it does in showbusiness. I choose to believe that it isn’t like that with surgery or nuclear power.

Alongside these exciting new responsibilities, I played Mr Worthy in Ellis’s shit production of The Recruiting Officer and wrote a musical with Ellis and Adam Cork (a brilliant and now Tony Award-winning composer) called Stud in which I also acted. (I didn’t play the title role.) And in the panto that year, Rob and I were the leads, playing Dick Whittington and his cat respectively.

We didn’t really know how to write our own two-man show, which, in retrospect, was a good thing. We didn’t, for example, start writing self-contained two-man sketches, which would have led to a stop-start show with too many blackouts. Neither did we approach it in the sort of two-man stand-uppy way of which I’d seen a lot around that time – where the two men address the audience alternately along a theme such as ‘A History of Love’ or ‘A Guide to Being a Dick’. We just sat down and started a silly story. It was about a Victorian inventor and a semi-alcoholic rustic programmer travelling through time to try and foil the apocalyptic ambitions of a crazed Welsh super-computer.

This was to be how all the stage shows of our early career were formatted. Pairs of characters would talk to each other, hopefully in a funny way, and then separate. Another pair of characters would do the same. Then maybe another. Then they’d start to mix pairings, in a way that was obviously limited by who was playing which character. Only by cheesy theatrical sleight of hand could anyone Rob played ever meet anyone else Rob played. We milked these limitations for laughs. As the show progressed and our stupid, often James Bond-style plot became dafter, any consequent slackening in audience interest could be made up for by the frequency, speed and desperation of our costume changes. The story didn’t have to be gripping if they were entertained by the sight of us frantically trying to tell it with inadequate resources.

To put it another way, it’s funny when people fuck up. That’s what we learned in our first attempt – the Innocent Millions debacle. From memory, we occasionally got a laugh from a pre-written joke, but largely our desperate attempt to struggle through the story and be wearing the right costume at the right time was what the audience were enjoying. At the end, they clapped and cheered like they’d properly enjoyed it. It felt like we’d done something good.

We learned a lot that night, some of which did us good. We learned that we worked well together as performers – that we were somehow greater than the sum of our parts. We learned that an audience wants to hear jokes or be told a funny story by people they’re enjoying watching and that not much else about a comedy show matters – that sometimes it’s okay, as Mr Sleigh at New College School tried to tell me, for the giant rabbit to take its mittens off. And we learned that our approach to writing material was basically sound.

But some of the other lessons we took from that night were harmful. However often we told ourselves in the years to come that rehearsing wasn’t just for pussies – and that this year, finally, we were going to take a slick and professional show up to Edinburgh – neither of us could quite shake our infatuation with winging it. We knew that hard work and professionalism were important in the career we’d chosen – and yet we couldn’t forget the first night of Innocent Millions when we’d wandered on stage with only the barest clue of what we were doing and it had gone down brilliantly.

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We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back

I don’t get pants in the end. I go in there. I negotiate my way through the massive shop, avoiding getting stuck like Father Ted in the lingerie section, and find the bit where men’s pants are on sale – beside massive photos of toned stomachs above snow-white-panted wholesome genital