FUEL and food prices on the rise, the credit crunch ever crunchier, this is not the best time to advise a spot of frivolous spending.
Yet if a smile is what you need, is there a better bargain than the complete works of Laurel and Hardy, half price at £50 at HMV?
Alternatively, you could make an evening of it in Scarborough, fish and chips and a walk on the front, followed by Tom McGrath's hugely humorous and moving play about Stan and Ollie.
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It dates from 1976, but it does not date at all, and so Paul Warwick's touring production for New Vic Theatre is just as memorable as Martin Barrass and Iain Rogerson's double act for Hull Truck some years ago now.
Buster Keaton had it that Stan Laurel was the greatest comic talent of them all, but Laurel instead would sing the praises of Oliver Norville Hardy.
What McGrath's play emphasises is their unique place as a double act - how they worked off each other, swapping over straight and funny roles and leaping from shorts to features - whereas Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd were solo, the Stooges ran to three and you could lose count of the Marx Brothers.
Robin Simpson plays skinny, fretful Stan to Steve Varnom's dignified, ever sure, big Southern gent, Ollie, in the meeting of the apologetic and apoplectic.
And, yes, the boys in the bowlers are uncannily reminiscent of Stan and Ollie in voice and mannerism and movement, while having their own sense of timing and a keen eye for working the audience into routines.
Yet that tells only half the story. On Lis Evans's set of wicker baskets, an office table, step ladders, trapdoors, sketches and slapstick are interwoven with the duo's life story, the warm yet complex relationship between the horse-gambling Hardy and workaholic Laurel, the shifting partnership with movie mogul Hal Roach.
This show is no mere double act either: Rab Handleigh makes a marvellous contribution as multi-instrumentalist, sound effects wizard and occasional stooge.
Tears of laughter make way for tears of sadness, but not for long, as the boys don angels' wings. You half expect them to fly, the show has been that magical.
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