After regular exposure in BBC1's The Entertainers(from April 1984), C4's Pushing Up Daisies(from November 1984) and its successor Coming Next(from September 1985), and LWT's Saturday Gang(from October 1986), Hale and Pace were granted their own special by LWT for Christmas 1986. Although it was to be another two years before they returned with a full series, this was the start of a long run.

Born 27 days apart in early 1953, Gareth Hale (the one with the black-turning-grey moustache) and Norman Pace (the more slightly built of the two) met at a teacher-training college in Eltham, south London, in 1971. Rooming together, they discovered much common ground, particularly humour, and soon started playing together in Daffy, a music-comedy group, supplementing the income they derived as PE teachers in local schools. By 1976 they had formed a double-act, playing pubs and clubs in the area, and this led to their regular engagements at the Woolwich Tramshed as part of a troupe called Fundation, and - inevitably - their inclusion inside the 'alternative comedians' bracket. It is a tag the pair have always been keen to play down, although they also acknowledge that they are a very long way removed from Mike and Bernie Winters, Morecambe and Wise or Little and Large, what one might term 'seaside' comics.

While their work is varied, Hale and Pace are known to be - perhaps, indeed, best known to be - spoof-dangerous comedians, whose humour has a definite, albeit tongue-in-cheek, 'edge'. The Two Rons - also known as The Management - is their most famous act, the pair donning tuxedoes and black bow-ties to assume the personas of a pair of unsmiling East End of London 'heavies', with violent, psychopathic thoughts that has seen them likened to the Kray Twins. Many other sketches featured similar hard-men, many of them caricaturing the sort of psychopathic gangsters who would become prevalent in British films of the late 1990s. Among Hale and Pace's other best-known personas are the children's TV presenters Billy (Hale) and Johnny (Pace), deadbeat cabbies Jed and Dave, money-conscious evangelists Nathan and Jeremiah, the brainless Curly and Nige and, latterly, the Road Rage Milko. A number of their TV sketches have aroused controversy over the years, none more so than when they pretended to have microwaved a cat.

ITV networked Hale And Pace - The Business, an hour-length compilation of the best sketches (including the famous Microwaved Moggy) on 26 December 1993, and there have been numerous other compilations and repackaged repeats over the years. An all-new 1996 programme, Hale And Pace Down Under (reflected in the above details), showed the pair out and about in Australia during a concert tour. Hale and Pace were also major participants in Trading Places, a pair of TV programmes broadcast to increase awareness of breast cancer - theirs was shown by C4 on 27 March 1992.

Irritated by what they saw as poor scheduling of their one-off comedy-drama April Fool's Day (see next paragraph), Hale and Pace decided to leave LWT in 1997 and moved across to the BBC, their first venture for the Corporation being to star in the three-part series, Jobs For The Boys, a non-comedic show in which they took on a variety of challenges, screened from 16 November 1997 (followed by one-offs on 4 May 1998 and 6 January 1999). In the meantime, LWT saluted their tenth anniversary with the company by airing an hour-length highlights compilation, Hale And Pace - Ten Years Hard, on 22 November 1997, and the duo's last series for LWT (copyrighted 1997) aired in 1998 on a week night (Thursday) rather than in the company's customary weekend schedule. Back at the Beeb, the boys fronted the critically-slammed variety/comedy/quiz/people-show hotchpotch h&p@bbc (BBC1, 28 April-1 June 1999); among their radio work was The Fabulous World Of Hale And Pace, broadcast by BBC Radio 2 on 13 April 1998.

Hale and Pace have also branched out into serious drama, playing the roles of Dalziel and Pascoe in the first TV realisation of Reginald Hill's detective characters, in the three-episode A Pinch Of Snuff, networked by ITV from 9 to 23 April 1994. (Dalziel And Pascoe - so titled - switched to BBC1 from 16 March 1996, with Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan in the title roles.) They also starred in a comedy-drama, April Fool's Day (LWT, 29 March 1997), playing a pair of unlikeable neighbours trying to better each other with practical jokes. This hour-long film also featured Susie Blake and Roy Hudd.