Tommy Steele tells Laura Davis about reprising the role of England’s most famous Christmas character

THE only humbugs anywhere near Tommy Steele are black and white and taste of mint. With his Cockney charm and (ageing) boy next door looks, he seems an unusual choice for the role of the world’s most famous Christmas hater.

But the 72-year-old entertainer so impressed audiences while playing Scrooge at the London Palladium that the musical’s producer, Liverpool-born Bill Kenwright, decided to take it on the road.

And so it is that the Empire Theatre will welcome back Steele, an assortment of ghosts and the Cratchit family later this month.

But it very nearly didn’t happen.

“I looked at the list and I said ‘just a minute – where’s Liverpool?’,” he recalls.

“I said: ‘You better put it there because there’s no way I’d do a show without playing Liverpool, it’s my second home.’”

As well as regularly touring to the city, he made a permanent mark on it in 1982, in the form of the Eleanor Rigby statue outside the Metquarter on Stanley Street.

The figure sits, head bowed, and listens to the problems of other lonely people who choose to rest beside her.

Steele was commissioned to create the work after he suggested the idea on a local radio phone-in.

A caller rang in and asked what he would suggest as a memorial to the Beatles.

“I was really on the spot but I said ‘it is Eleanor Rigby sitting on a bench in a little street listening to the problems of everybody’.

“Then I went home and it must have been about two or three months later I got a letter from Liverpool Council saying we’ve had a meeting and we’d like to commission you to do Eleanor.

“I’d never worked in bronze before so it was a lovely opportunity for me to do a nice bit of work and an even bigger opportunity that it would go into a public area.”

Steele is quite comfortable that many people who admire the sculpture may not be aware it was he who created it.

“I don’t mind at all,” he says.

“I should imagine all the people that come from abroad to see her don’t know me from Adam.

“There’s no graffiti on her. They really look after her, which is lovely.”

Scrooge, by contrast, has little patience for other people’s problems – even if it means they can’t afford a goose for their festive dinner.

That’s until he’s visited in the night by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, who teach him the error of his ways.

Steele welcomes the opportunity to play a character whose personality evolves so dramatically within a single show.

“It’s wonderful to know as an actor that you can start him off as this grizzly, awful, naughty man and as the evening goes on he becomes gentler and subtler and kinder,” he says.

“The audience half the time are pulling themselves from the ceiling because they’ve had the shock of their lives. And then another ghost appears from nowhere.

“And then you see this fella suddenly mature and start to see the error of his ways.”

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol as a short story in December 1843 with illustrations by John Leech.

In the century and a half since, it has never been out of print and has been adapted for television, film, stage and opera.

“I love Dickens, I love everything he’s done, but I don’t think you can beat this one,” says the father-of-one.

“The great story of Scrooge is it has to be that one moment in his life, when he’s thinking of the morals of his life and his own mortality too.

“You mention A Christmas Carol or Scrooge to anyone and they know exactly what you’re talking about.

“Isn’t it amazing that somebody can write a story like that and it stays the distance, worldwide?”

Steele has demonstrated great sticking power, originally making his name as a teenage heart-throb with the rock and roll band The Steelmen in the mid-1950s.

He progressed to stage and film musicals in the 1960s, starring in Half a Sixpence, the Happiest Millionaire and Finian’s Rainbow (as a leprechaun-turned-human named Og).

But despite his lively countenance in the movies, it’s theatre he enjoys the most.

“Films are boring,” he announces.

“Out of all the things you do in showbusiness – let’s look at the list, recordings, television show, films and stage shows – filming out of the lot is the worst.

“You spend literally all day long sitting down eating doughnuts, sausage rolls and drinking coffee.

“At the end of a good day’s shooting you’ve done one and a half minutes film time – and cameras don’t clap.”

SCROOGE is at the Empire Theatre from November 23-28.