Frank speaking

Geoffrey Hughes (top) and Des O'Malley in Absolutely Frank

ABSOLUTELY FRANK at Oldham Coliseum

THE team of Eddie Yeats and Stan Ogden was a “Coronation Street” comedy duo to rival anything on TV.

So it is good to find Geoffrey Hughes, who played Yeats and has since created scruffy, endearing characters in “Keeping Up Appearances” and “Heartbeat”, back in another duo, on stage for the first time in seven years.

And this time he’s a bit of an artistically-minded fusspot — and what were the odds of ever seeing that? But while his partnership with Des O’Malley in Tim Firth’s comedy “Absolutely Frank”, might not reach the comic heights of Ogden and Yeats, it raises a lot of laughs.

Hughes plays Frank, who erects the 10ft-high signs you see on the sides of buildings. O’Malley is Alan, a youngster more interested in drawing than the sign-fixing hardware Frank has made his life’s work.

Except Frank really wants to be a novelist, a hobby he indulges by soliloquising his latest yarn when he’s alone: 60ft up on a ledge he’s alone a lot.

Which is lucky, because the novels are terrible. Frank has ambition, he admits, but none of the talent. Alan, meanwhile has talent but little ambition.

Firth wrote the first act as a one-act play in 1991, and revisited it to fill in the details of what became the pair in a second act set 15 years later. Frank is now Alan’s junior, in a different business, and neither is really cut out for his job. Firth’s rather downbeat premise is that before you decide the world outside is where your happiness lies, you might already have found it.

Like the title, I’ll be frank: I have a problem with Firth’s stage writing — even his big hit “Calendar Girls”, a warm-hearted film but a below-average stage play.

Firth produces terrific dialogue and endearing characters, but is decidedly average at building a play around them. This one looks like two barely-connected one-act plays.

On top of which, he always seems to write for TV: certainly some scenes need close-ups only film can offer.

There’s an example in Noreen Kershaw’s workmanlike Coliseum production: the pair get trapped by a part of the scenery and the way they get out is so contrived you wonder what Firth was thinking. On TV though, it just might be made to work.

Luckily the actors’ strong partnership isn’t contrived: O’Malley provides the final comedy shots on goals set up by Hughes to great effect.

And though the latter — 65 during the run — is clearly a little ill-at-ease with the large volume of dialogue, the pair finish, like their ledge, on top.