Robbie Coltrane claims a day doesn’t go by without someone asking him what happened to Tutti Frutti. John Byrne’s 1987 comedy-drama was a huge hit, picking up six Baftas and rave reviews. Yet, through conspiracy or neglect, it has gathered dust in the BBC archives ever since.

Nobody can deny its place in TV history. Without this bittersweet tale of a rock’n’roll band on a jubilee tour of Scotland’s least likely clubs, the central actors might never have got the exposure they deserved.

Coltrane could have spent the rest of his career playing bit parts in the Young Ones; Emma Thompson may never have cracked Hollywood; and would anyone have asked Richard Wilson to play Victor Meldrew? Their Tutti Frutti characters entered our cultural memory.

Coltrane was Danny McGlone, brother of the late Big Jazza, front man of the Majestics. Thompson was Suzi Kettles, the old school mate Danny runs into when he gets home from New York for his brother’s funeral. Wilson was Eddie Clockerty, the band’s wheeler-dealer manager with an unscrupulous eye for a quick buck.

The fact that nobody’s seen the TV show in nearly 20 years adds to the allure of Byrne’s own stage adaptation for the National Theatre of Scotland.

Tutti Frutti is that rare thing, a programme with mainstream approval and cult credibility.

If it had never been away, the stage version might have looked exploitative. As it is, the revival seems the sharpest of moves.

The great opportunity opened up by the stage is in the music. The Majestics are a covers band, playing That’ll Be the Day, Three Steps to Heaven and Runaway. Despite the irony that their one hit would never have come about without some funny business at a chart-return shop, Byrne never suggests they aren’t a proficient band. This gives the actors in Tony Cownie’s production the chance to prove their musical worth.

This they do to storming effect at intervals throughout the show. But, unlike many commercial productions that cash in on our love of music from a bygone era, Tutti Frutti has a hilarious script to match. Yes, the odd gag falls flat, but there are simply too many colourful one-liners, all delivered with the driest of deadpan wit, to make us doubt we are in the hands of a master comic craftsman.

The danger, of course, was that this cast would fail to live up to the memory of its TV counterparts. But even though Tom Urie doesn’t share Coltrane’s mastery of Byrne’s ornate language, he makes a genial Danny, who is a forceful presence behind the keyboard. The gorgeous Dawn Steele is more than a match for Emma Thompson as Suzi Kettles and, like John Ramage’s highly strung Eddie Clockerty, she makes the part her own.

Byrne’s tale is as much about the sorry aftermath of rock’n’roll excess as it is a celebration. There are poignant turns from Pauline Knowles and Helen Mallon, as the wife and girlfriend of Tam Dean Burn’s wayward guitarist, Vincent. The television legacy leaves us with too many short, sketchy scenes, which would have been better suited to a more fluid staging, but Byrne’s heart and soul keeps the whole thing rocking.

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