The down side of a quick-fire sketch show, such as Totally Tom supplied to a highly tickled full house at the North Wall on Saturday, is the sheer brevity of our encounters with the gallery of oddball characters depicted.

On they bound to delight us for five minutes or so with well-scripted, well-observed presentations of life in various curious forms, then they are off — seemingly for ever.

But perhaps not. That there can be ongoing existence for the creations of this talented two-man team is shown by the success of their High Renaissance Man, a big hit on YouTube. Tom Stourton plays a nerdy, self-important, upper-crust Bristol University student organising a doomed-to-disaster club night at a discotheque. Tom Palmer is his savvy, sex-mad housemate.

Their comic interaction is sublime. It comes, one supposes, from the rapport that arises from the Toms having been schoolmates. Their friendship continued when Stourton — son of the (thus far) more famous Ed — left for, yes, Bristol University, and Palmer for Oxford, where he made memorable contributions to the student stage.

High Renaissance Man supplies the template for some, though not all, of the pair’s stage creations, with Stourton often pompous, far from intellectually gifted, while his partner proves adroit and fly. But there is a rich variety of characters on view, testament to the acting skills of both men.

The biggest laughs for me arose from a horribly true-to-life speech-making at a young lady’s 21st birthday party during which Palmer’s proud father is constantly interrupted by Stourton’s hooray Henry guest with his disobliging comments on Poppy’s looks and wide sexual availability.

I also enjoyed their duo of gay cokeheads; Bratwurst, a spoof TV soap set among the Hitler Youth; and the surreal, Pythonesque depiction of a man addicted to the use of photo-booths (Stourton) to the fury of his tough-nut Glaswegian brother.