There have been calls to get Laurel and Hardy back on free to air TV for years, but with the movie “Stan & Ollie” screenwriter Jeff Pope and director Jon S. Baird have gone one better, they’ve managed to bring Hollywood’s favourite double act convincingly back to life with this beautiful small film about two big stars.

Laurel and Hardy made over 100 films together from being formed as a comedy team at the Hal Roach Studios in late 1926. The film opens ten years later during the making of “Way out West”. In a slickly choreographed sequence worthy of one their own movies we follow the pair walking from dressing room to sound stage discussing their professional and personal travails “Next time I won’t even get married, I’ll just find a woman I don’t like and buy her a house” Stan mutters to Ollie. The heart of the sharp and witty script is the fundamental difference of ambition between the two men: Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) wants creative control of their movies, whereas Oliver “Babe” Hardy (John C. Reilly) wants security and a steady income; Laurel “lives behind a typewriter”, Hardy lives for parties, fishing and the racetrack. Fast forward to 1953 and the pair are still together and rather incongruously are booking into a guest house in a rainy Newcastle to tour some of the smaller music halls of Britain and Ireland. The remainder of the film explains the extraordinary and true story of how they got into this nice mess.

It’s a moving, perfectly acted tale, recreating 1950s England with a nostalgic golden glow. No longer making movies the tour sees their need to still be part of a business that has discarded them, they improvise moments of slapstick for the newsreel cameras and Stan bombards the London producer behind a proposed Robin Hood movie with calls. After he is finally told in person the financing has fallen through Coogan brilliantly (and silently) captures Laurel’s despair as he looks up at a huge poster advertising the latest spectacular Abbott and Costello film. But it’s the recreation of their live act that brings the film to life. There is no filmed footage of what they did on stage, only scratchy audio recordings, scripts and memories of audience members remain. The love that we as a country must have still felt for these two ageing entertainers is wonderfully captured in long shots of audiences laughing at Coogan and Reilly’s uncanny recreations. Alongside the two leads special mention must go to Shirley Henderson as Lucille Hardy and Nina Arianda as Ida Laurel, who steal many of their scenes, and giving us “two double acts for the price of one” to quote Rufus Jones’ slippery promoter Bernard Delfont.

It’s not a documentary however. Three different UK tours are conflated into one to streamline the story, but that is a minor quibble when so much care has been taken by everyone involved to honour the memory of a beautiful relationship that lasted for decades despite serious financial and health setbacks. “We’re older, but we’re not done yet” as Babe declares. Cue audience cheers.