Tommy is still on song

By Eileen Caiger Gray - 10/07/2008

I had to picture the toothy grin for myself, but the chirpy, cheery Cockney voice at the other end of the phone was unmistakeable: I was talking to a living legend - Britain’s first ever guitar-toting, quiff-combing rock‘n’roll idol, Tommy Steele.

I was chatting with the chap who was Singin’ The Blues at Number One in the ‘50s, a star of the London Palladium who sang about a Little White Bull and then sang and danced his way through film musicals like The Happiest Millionaire and Finian’s Rainbow, and stage musicals like Hans Christian Anderson and Half a Sixpence. And all that was just for starters!

Fifty years on and Tommy’s still going strong  - onstage and off. Since last year, he’s been rocketing around Britain talking to the animals in a lavish stage production of Doctor Dolittle. Tommy says he’s enjoyed all the roles and finds playing dotty Dolittle a lot of fun by making him much more of a crackpot than Rex Harrison’s film version.

He delights in the fact that it’s a real family show and finds the children’s laughter particularly rewarding. He has a daughter himself, but no grandchildren. And does he talk to the animals in real life? Well, he used to - he’s had three pet dogs in the past - but he’s decided not to have another. He just can’t face any more of the sadness and tears that inevitably come at the end of a pet’s life. Knowing how Tommy lost various siblings and loved ones when he was just a lad, avoiding added grief and loss seems even more understandable.

I wondered if, after starring and directing Singin’ In The Rain in the 80s, cross-dressing in Some Like It Hot, and being a musical Scrooge three or four years back, there might be another role Tommy still fancied. “King Lear!” he laughed. A singing, tap-dancing Lear? Now there’s a challenge for some budding musical writer - or even for the RSC!

Now, you would think a demanding tour was enough for someone who’s now in his seventies, yet Tommy swears he does a workout before every performance and, when he’s not performing, he runs seven miles, goes to the gym and plays tennis. A true man of steel, this Mr Hicks!

A good advertisement too, for being teetotal. Tommy says he’s never developed a liking for alcohol. “Anyway, one small sherry and ten minutes later, I’m asleep!” he says. Besides, he can’t see the point of looking and feeling so ill through deliberately pouring alcohol into your system. A more appealing way of relaxing for him once the show finishes in July will be to play tennis and go fishing in Florida.

Fishing must be the only time the man’s ever immobile. It’s a good few years since Tommy’s one-man shows but he still plays guitar, and he also sculpts and paints. (His Eleanor Rigby sculpture is in Liverpool, Bermonsey Boy at Rotherhythe.) He likes to paint figures, he says, somewhat in the style of Lowry, “- but badly,” he joked. (Well, I think he was joking.) On top of that, he somehow finds time to write, currently working on a sequel to his Bermondsey Boy autobiography, entitled Musical Man. But, even on top of that - wait for it - he’s writing a history of Britain.

Because racecourses played a great role in his younger days, before he joined the merchant navy, I wondered if Tom ever found time for race meetings nowadays. His dad, Thomas Hicks senior, known as Darbo, a larger than life character who looked like Winston Churchill, was, along with his rascally mates, an accomplished tout and tipster; so, by the age of 14, young Tom had visited all the courses in the land. Keen on the old anecdote, he fondly recalled turning up in Doncaster in 1963, in his twenties, wondering how (in pre-mobile phone days) he might find his dad in a crowd of 30,000. Tom only had to mention Darbo to the big bookies at the rail, busy, in their smart suits, taking bets for hundreds of pounds, and he was conjured up like magic through the silent skill of tic-tac.

His gee-gee days behind him, Tommy now mostly gets up north only when he’s touring, though his wife of forty-seven years, Ann Donaghue, is a Leeds lass. When he’s out and about in the provinces, he says, heads turn in surprise, but when he’s back in London, where he still lives, it’s no big deal for folk to be saying hello to Tommy Steele as he passes by, which probably makes life easier.

My precious minutes with him having passed, Flash! Bang! Wallop! Mr Steele had already whisked himself back into the whirlwind of show business - so I never did get to ask that wretched Elvis question I‘d been saving … did he REALLY meet Elvis in London as was widely reported but never officially confirmed?

Doctor Dolittle will be at the Bradford Alhambra from July 1-12 and at Sheffield’s Lyceum from July 15-26. After that, Tommy‘s free to relax - though I doubt that he will for long!