If you step outside it for a moment you think what are we doing with our lives?A rhetorical question: the pair's

If you step outside it for a moment you think, what are we doing with our lives?"A rhetorical question: the pair's careers could not be doing any better. The show has received rave reviews around the country, although the critics were slightly cooler as the highly polished version arrived in London last week.Pete Clark of the Evening Standard was perhaps the least charitable: "Perhaps, when they have finished counting the cash from this wildly successful tour, Walliams and Lucas might care to consider making some comedy that comes spontaneously." Dominic Maxwell of The Times was less acerbic: "It's a shame some of the skits are so frugal with the surprises We're resigned to the TV show being the same each week. Here, though, such resolute 'giving the people what they want' feels hollow eventually, as if they didn't trust us to want more than Little Britain, the brand."But the audience cares little. The shows get standing ovations, the arrival of every catchphrase garners a round of applause.After the show at the Apollo, a scrum four-deep seethes around the merchandise stand where T-shirts with slogans such as "Want that one" and "Computer says no" cost £20; a "No but yeah but" beanie hat sets punters back £10 and an enamel Daffyd ("the only gay in the village") keyring is a fiver.By the end of this tour in December, Walliams and Lucas will have sold out over 200 live shows. When the tickets went on sale last year they shifted more than 200,000 in a single day.Each of the three series has topped the DVD sales charts, the first selling more than 1.8m to become the biggest selling release of a TV series.

Still to come there is a Little Britain interactive DVD quiz and in a month the DVD of the live show will be released.There is also the global audience. Last week, Little Britain began broadcasting in Japan, to cap its sales in 26 other countries, not to mention its broadcast on BBC Prime which is seen in 100 nations.So what does this all say about the audiences who gobble up the duo's every utterance? Cultural commentator Peter York thinks Little Britain offers something for everyone: "It works for different people in different ways. They've got an incredibly wide cultural range - they've obviously read and taken in all sorts of high and low culture. There are jokes in there for laddish lads, and for gay people and for people who think they're terribly clever and above it all."Plus they have a thousand catchphrases.

Tom Baker's voiceover makes it respectable and stable, like a national treasure. It's a terribly clever mix."It's the gay show for straight boys. It's chock-full of gay everything, but the people who like it are straight beer-and-curry boys. They do politically incorrect jokes in a politically correct way. If you didn't know that they were nice and 50 per cent gay themselves you'd think it was heavy going - you'd think that characters like Andy and Pete and Vicky Pollard were making fun of the underclass."Alan Yentob, the BBC's creative director, said: "Does anyone realise how difficult it is to write a genuinely funny sketch show with a host of memorable characters and a plethora of unforgettable catchphrases? Well, Matt Lucas and David Walliams have done it."Melvyn Bragg simply compares the duo to the creators of the Goon Show: "They are hitting new heights of comedy."Walliams and Lucas have been friends for 16 years, meeting at the National Youth Theatre in their teens, but it was Lucas, the younger of the pair, who established a public profile first.