HENRY Blofeld's career has been built on a lie, as Peter Baxter gleefully reminds him in Rogues On The Road, the double act that picks up their life of cricketing travels away from the field of play.

The partnership is well grooved and groomed from the three years of their previous show, and just as the best opening partners have an innate sense of when to run between the wickets, so Blofeld and Baxter click together.

Baxter, the Test Match Special producer for 34 years on the BBC, teases stories from Blofeld, the last of the old-school commentators, who is a bon viveur and raconteur with a sometimes runaway golden tongue on air but an unstinting appreciation of the summer game's supreme joys and the dapper fashion sense of Mr Toad.

Blofeld is the six-hitter of the duo, recounting his airport and aeroplane scrape with a furious Ian Botham; his naked awkward moment in a Nottingham hotel; the beautiful girls of the Copacabana, who turned out to have an extra long leg of the non-cricketing variety; and the Jamaican day when Noel Coward sang Mad Dogs And Englishmen to him at his Firefly house.

Baxter is the Jonathan Agnew to Geoffrey Boycott in the other cricket duo doing the regular theatre rounds, but he is more than Blofeld's agent provocateur, revealing a gift for mimicry and accents from around the globe as he places airport tags on destinations on the map behind the duo.

As the whisky decanter descends, there is time too for questions from the floor, met with quick wit and the swashbuckling blade, rather than a straight bat, by Blowers and Backers. As for the aforementioned Blofeld lie, you must see the show for yourself to learn the truth.