Family Favourite

Profile talks with the popular showbusiness veteran Tommy Steele

IF you were trying to come up with the name of one person who, for more than half a century now, has represented the best of family entertainment, there would surely be a very clear winner...Tommy Steele!

His is one of the great British showbiz rags to riches stories, the tale of the Bermondsey boy who joined the Merchant Navy and was docked in America when he hear the sound that would change his life - the music of Buddy Holly.

Launched on the home market as the British Elvis Presley, he rose quickly to fame as the frontman of his own band, The Steelmen, after their first single, Rock With The Caveman, reached number 13 in the UK singles charts in 1956.

But if the bid to become a home-grown Elvis never quite materialised, that hardly mattered when instead Tommy became firmly established as an all-round star for all seasons, who by 1957 had even received the rather unusual accolade of starring in the film version of his life called, with no surprise, The Tommy Steele Story.

It may not have been rock ‘n’ roll but songs like Little White Bull - from another of his film hits, tommy the Toreador - made him a family favourite and by the 1960s he had developed into that rarity, a British song and dance man who actually managed to crack the American movie market.

His big hit both on stage and screen was Half a Sixpence, but he successfully took up the Hollywood challenge with films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Finian’s Rainbow, with Fred Astaire, and Disney’s The Happiest Millionaire - alongside legendary Oscar-winner Greer Garson.

Since the 1970s he’s become a fixture in both the West End and on tour in shows as varied as Hans Christian Anderson, Some Like It Hot and Singin’ in the Rain and most recently won acclaim for his London palladium performance as Scrooge.

And now he’s the star of Doctor Dolittle, the stage version of the 1960s Hollywood musical about the vet who discovers he can talk to the animals.
He’s been on the road with the lavish production, which comes to Sheffield’s Lyceum for two weeks from July 15, for almost a year now and insists: “I just love it. When you get a good show like this you don’t want to let it go. It’s the best family show I have found since Hans Christian Anderson.”

That said, though, he does then make a perhaps surprising confession - he didn’t actually like the original at all and had to be persuaded it was the right show for him.

“They asked me to do it years ago but I never did like the film, Rex Harrison playing it like a professor,” he says. “I saw Dolittle as a crackpot, an all-singing, all-dancing mad man.”

He didn’t like the movie, then, but he also had very little time for the original West End stage version of the show, which starred an inappropriately youthful Phillip Schofield and a cast of animatronic creatures, including a parrot with the voice of Hollywood legend Julie Andrews!
“You can’t get any pace in a show where everything is worked by electronics,” Tommy points out and pace and energy is extremely important in a show aimed at a younger audience.

What changed his mind was when composer Leslie Bricusse, with whom he had already had an enormous success in London Palladium Christmas hit Scrooge, agreed to revisit the material, even creating some new songs to suit Tommy’s talents.

“The Doctor is more of a song and dance man now,” he says. “There’s more fantasy and also it’s much quicker - you’re not sitting there for hours any more.”
It’s no less spectacular but, without giving too much away, the animatronics have been replaced by a more imaginative but perhaps traditional approach to theatre magic.

“There are no electronic special effects,” Tommy insists. “Without telling the kids too much, there are real people in those costumes.”
His fortnight in Sheffield marks the end of a tour which has taken up the past 12 months, a tiring enough schedule for a young performer but surely particularly gruelling for a star who is now 72 years old.

“It’s such an expensive show that you don’t say I’m only going to do it for a few months,” Tommy says. “You have to be honest with the producer and you have to give it the longest shot you can.”

He will admit that he’s looking forward to putting his feet up for a while but it sounds like there’s no chance that a man who’s been a star since the early 1950s has any plans for taking things easy.

“What I really like is to be able to finish this but, just as I’m leaving the stage door, somebody puts a script in my hand and says: ‘Do you fancy working of this for a year?’. All I want is for somebody to come to me with something that really interests me.”