KIT Hesketh-Harvey and pianist partner The Widow are the non-festivalgoer's definition of a Harrogate International Festival act

Indeed, they would have been for any of their 21 years of crisply camp musical satire.

Elegant and waspish, their sophisticated revue is the essence of the Flanders & Swann, Cambridge Footlights and Radio 4 line of English wits, and they play to a Majestic ballroom audience short on what they call "young shoots".

Yet their civilised humour is as on the button and as close to the knuckle as any fashionable scruff at The Other Side Comedy Club in York, and more literate.

The cut-glass Kit is thinning on top, the boyishly cheeky The Widow greying at the temples, but their material is doing neither, their love of innuendo and linguistic gymnastics undiminished. They still dress for dinner or, rather, for after-dinner revels, in a 21st anniversary show that affords them the perfect excuse to dust off the vintage and stir in acidic drops of the new.

From behind charming smiles and immaculate diction, they are in rude health satirising George "Dubya" Bush's paranoia, Nigella Lawson's culinary flirting, Sondheim's musical failings and Robin Cook's ginger sexual prowess.

They glance witheringly at golf and text messaging and have a laugh at the Greek Olympic preparations, and in the finale they counter a daft Punjabi remix of Nessun Dorma with a moving African lament, The Leopard.

Joan Rivers' face will surely crack up when they do their Rivers send-up while chaperoning her at the Grand Opera House in York on October 11.

Updated: 09:28 Friday, July 30, 2004