They’re the latest in a long line of British songsmiths who have taken the witty ditty to dizzying heights.

From Gilbert and Sullivan to Flanders and Swan, not to mention Kit and Widow, Noel Coward and Victoria Wood, Flo and Joan sit very nicely indeed in the history of humourous songwriting while in the process revamping it for the internet generation.

Born and brought up in Portsmouth, Flo and Joan are sisters Nicola and Rosie Dempsey (they took their name from their Nan and her sister).

Rather appropriately for the modern age we live in, it’s on the web that they first made their name, to be more precise with the 2016 Song, which incredibly is still cranking up the hits, to date 670,000, again to be precise.

Lamenting the loss of the likes of David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Victoria Wood as well as Donald Trump and Brexit, it’s was the catalyst for has been a meteoric rise.

Rosie says: “We had already been writing and performing for a little while and by then we had about an hour’s worth of material.

“It just seemed like a good subject to tackle, especially because that’s all people were talking about on-line.

“Funnily enough,” Nicola adds, “it was a really quick and easy song to write, I suppose because we knew it would have a limited time span and that we had to get it on-line quickly.”

The musical comedy pairing began when Nicola decided to go and take an Improv comedy course at The Second City, first in Chicago, and then later in Toronto, Canada.

She says: “I was on this music degree course, which I’ll be honest I was finding really dull and I’d heard about The Second City.

Braintree and Witham Times: Way to go Flo - the pair play Colchester and Edinburgh

“It’s where these incredible comedians like Tiny Fey and Bill Murray went. There’s nothing like it in the UK and I thought it might be quite good fun to go over so I basically made the decision to go in my second year, saved up loads of money, and then went out there after I’d graduated.”

And it turned out to be such good fun that sister Rosie decided to join her.

“I was literally three months behind her,” she tells me. “I did a degree as well but had no idea what I wanted to do.

“Like Nicola I hadn’t done any stand-up or comedy writing before but it looked so great I thought I would give it a go too.

“I did three months in Chicago like she did and then followed her up to Toronto.”

They posted the song while still in Canada as Nicola says ‘because if we were terrible, no one back in the UK would know’.

Rosie adds: “Both of us had always grown up with music and comedy, and we both loved acts like Victoria Wood, so we were very intrigued by it and whether we could actually do it.

“When we first started performing we did a whole mixture of stuff,” Nicola says. “There was a poem, which we still do, a song, and a sketch, which was terrible. So we ditched the sketch and kept the song and poem.”

“Toronto was great because no one knew us there,” Rosie continues. “It allowed us to experiment with material to ten or 15 people in a black box of a room.

Braintree and Witham Times: Adverts - Flo and Joan making their name Nationwide

“Then when we had enough confidence we came over to Edinburgh and did a little show at the Fringe in 2016.”

The precursor to their over-night internet sensation, the pair are not getting ready for their new Edinburgh Fringe show, Alive on Stage, as well as their first UK tour, which will hopefully see them return to Colchester towards the end of the year.

Which is a good job really seeing as next week’s pre-Edinburgh gig is sold out already.

“It’s going to be a bit of a first for us,” Rosie tells me, “because we normally do just an hour but this time we’re going to do two halves made-up of new songs and old favourites.”

Those old favourites such Have A Cup of Tea and Save the Bees are already slowly embedding themselves into the nation’s psyche thanks to their new found fame on the telly.

That’s because after having made the move back to the UK, Flo and Joan are now perhaps best known for a series of adverts they did for the Nationwide Building Society late last year.

In the campaign the sisters sang about the Crimbo Limbo, a perky little calypso number about the time between Christmas and New Year where ‘you’re shoving chocolate in your belly, as you fight over the telly, and then hoover up another sausage roll’.

Then there was the one sat in the back of a removal van called Small, Small House, in which they describe their 6ft house where their bed doubles up as a ironing board and they store boxes in the holes in the wall.

Nicola says: “We had never worked in the UK before, didn’t have any contacts, not toured here, so to get a job where they paid you to do what we were already doing was amazing.”

Braintree and Witham Times: Reading Festival 2017 - Sunday 27th August; Artist - Flo and Joan - Comedy Tent.

“They gave us a theme, we wrote a bunch of songs,” Rosie adds, “and they picked the best one. Then they filmed us doing them, which was very cool. Short little songs, which were right up our street and fun to do.

“It was actually a really good challenge for us as well because we can be a bit sweary and these songs needed to be family friendly.”

Flo & Joan: Joan & Flo is at the Colchester Arts Centre on Thursday, June 21, from 8pm. Tickets are already sold out but to go on the reserves waiting list call 01206 500900.

They also play Alive On Stage at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and that show will be back at the Colchester Arts Centre next April 12. To book early, go to colchesterartscentre.com