Then the statue of joanna lumley came down on wires, it was life size which was awesome, and dawn was sort of puppetting her which was hilarious.

DAWN FRENCH and Jennifer Saunders launched their double-act in 1980 in a strip-club in London's Soho. Two females on the alternative comedy circuit was not unheard of but hardly the norm at the time.

Thirty years later, their farewell show to decades of trail-blazing work is a celebratory pick-and-mix of sketches, celebrity parodies, film excerpts and mock bickering from a couple of dames entrenched in comedy's history.

The pair start things off as their onscreen selves: bickering and competitive friends, one full of chutzpah and cheek, the other all-knowing and slightly world-weary. The familiar "white room" appears - mantelpiece, bubble-wrapped couch - for French's health check from Saunders's slapdash doctor before the pair perform the first sketch they wrote together.

Few actors in their early 50s could swing from playing two misguided 15-year-olds discussing sex ("By now the todger is this big") to grannies hooning on motorised scooters, ageing Britons living large in Florida and the poignant private school boarders contemplating Christmas alone.

French, always happier than Saunders to look an audience in the eye, enters the front rows with a chocolate-searching instrument to find sweets alongside nits, rodents and cobwebbed nether regions.

Saunders follows with groiny thrusts and dizzy narcissism in her merciless parody of Madonna, the celebrity who, the pair love to explain, consistently refused to appear on the show.

A running joke about rivalry and their solo careers produces the mother and daughter sketch they wrote that inspired Absolutely Fabulous and a towering visit from the Rev Geraldine Granger from the Vicar Of Dibley. Less strong is a visit from the inhabitants of Prickly Farm.

French and Saunders say they're bowing out because such comedy is a young person's game. The pressure to create perfect, catchphrase-inducing, high-ratings comedy now could never foster such potent, pioneering and enduring silliness.