Bring on the pies Still Game duo Jack and Victor are ready to party!

Game on for Greg Hemphill and Ford Kiernan.

Tomorrow morning, Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill will rehearse on the enormous Hydro stage with the rest of the Craiglang gang for the first time.

The return of Still Game, the most anticipated show in Scottish theatre history, is now only five days away and Greg has a few words to describe how he and his comedy partner are feeling in the final countdown.

“Foreboding, terror, excitement,” he laughs.

“Actually, you know what this is like? It’s like when you throw a party and hope everyone comes and has a good time. We’ve worked on it for 18 months and now it’s time to shut up and do the show.”

Thankfully, the men behind Victor McDade and Jack Jarvis aren’t ready to shut up just quite yet.

They bounce off of each other as we chat in the Hydro, which will be filled with 12,000 fans an incredible 21 times over the next month, and it’s hard to imagine how they managed without each other during their seven-year split.

They finish each other’s sentences, have each other in knots and generally look like they’re having the time of their lives.

Today, just like in the show, the punchline of their jokes is Gavin Mitchell, better known as Boaby the Barman, after the actor cracked his ribs when he fell off his bike recently.

Ford: “I told him five minutes before that it was a bad idea to be cycling to work. He’s a clumsy b*****d and that’s the truth.”

Greg: “He’s an idiot. I told him to get a bike with two wheels, rather than a unicycle.”

Ford: “You don’t have to be good at everything, Gavin.”

Greg: “And do you have to juggle?”

Ford: “What’s with the fire-eating? There’s a show coming up soon. Actually, we’re trying to put about a rumour that he burst a rib laughing at the script.”

And so it continues. But behind the laughs, they’re deadly serious about the show and what it means to its thousands of fans.

“We would never miss a show, no matter what. They can wheel us out if they have to,” Greg, 44, insists.

“The idea of anyone missing out after all the anticipation well, it isn’t going to happen. When something like that happens you do get a fright. You realise we’re all fallible and it’s scary.”

“Aye, I’ve cut down from eight to two pies a day and I’m not drinking as much,” Ford responds, raising another laugh. “You have to look after yourself.”

The cast began rehearsals on August 18, running through the script for nine hours every day, but nothing can prepare them for the Hydro stage.

“We’ve walked the space and it’s like a football park,” Ford, 52, says. “You just can’t grasp the scale of it. We were on opposite sides of the stage and Greg was like a speck.

“You have to remember we started this at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997, with seven or eight people in the crowd.

“OK, it grew to a couple of hundred people, but it was humble, humble beginnings. We’re used to a tiny stage.”

Greg adds: “If someone had said to us after that first one that all these years later we’d be playing to thousands of people in this arena with the same show, we’d have told them to beat it. For this stuff? This nonsense?”

The script is confidential and Ford and Greg hope the early audiences keep quiet about the story.

“The first question we’re asked by everyone is what happens in the show, and it’s a funny question because it’s one we’re never going to answer,” Greg says.

“Comedy is all about surprise and there are a few surprises in the script that we hope people don’t tell their mates about.”

Ford continues: “It’s the same as a twist in a film you wouldn’t tell your pal.”

“Aye, but people are going to lose their minds when Billy Connolly comes into the Clansman,” Greg whispers.

“And Sean Connery coming on in the wheelchair and punching Boaby?” Ford says. “Funny, funny, funny.”

So once the Hydro run is over, what comes next?

“Back to work,” Greg enthuses. “We’ve done other stuff for seven years and we could’ve done this for a couple of nights and it would’ve been a nice swansong. But the whole thing has been energised by the audience’s reaction.”

“Everybody we meet asks when it’s coming back on the telly, so we know there’s a demand,” Ford says. “The BBC is talking to us. We’ve thought about taking it on tour as well, everything is a possibility.

“I know Mrs Brown’s Boys has been in Australia and there’s a lot of expats over there and in Canada, but it’s one bun at a time. We’re certainly not short of material anyway.”

“As the world turns and new stuff happens, you’ve got these characters that will react to that,” agrees Greg. “That’s always been the fun.

“They’re a couple of opinionated old b******s, the same as all their pals.

“They get away with a lot and they’re cheeky, but they’re widowed and have had a tough life, so people relate to them.

“But we relate to them too, because they’re us. We love the characters like the audience does and we’re very protective towards them.”

“Aye,” Ford adds. “This is a reunion and the fans have rewarded us en masse. We belong to them.”

Ford says he watches what he wears because he fears turning into Jack before his time.

“I find myself out shopping, looking at jackets, and thinking, ‘that’s nice’, and then realising it’s the same colour as one of Jack’s and as much as I like it, I can’t buy it.

“Every man reaches a point in life, probably when they hit about 60, that they go caramel and beige everything in their wardrobe is these colours.

“I’m trying to stick to black, or any colour that Jack wouldn’t wear.”

He adds: “My sister says I’m actually better looking as an old man.

“It’s not the biggest compliment, but at least I know I’ll be a wily old fox some day, which is something to look forward to!”

“Lots of people ask us how we write,” Ford says. “The answer is, we become the characters from the moment we wake up.

“We have a bit of banter and improvisation and when we come up with something decent, we say, ‘oh, let’s get that written down’.

“Nothing makes it into the script unless we’ve heard Jack and Victor say it.”

At this point, Greg chips in: “Sometimes when we’re writing we’ll be having an argument about a script point and Ford’s wife Lesley will walk in and say it’s like listening to the actual Jack and Victor!”

Report by Murray Scougall and Tracey Bryce