Lost, soaking wet and in fear of death by electrocution, Tommy Steele tells Viv Hardwick of a recent trip to the North-East which he’s never likely to forget.

TOMMY Steele made his professional debut at the Sunderland Empire way back in 1956, but the entertainer who went on to world fame has another North-East story to add to his collection when he last toured Dr Doolittle to Wearside three years ago.

On the eve of opening Scrooge at the Empire, running Monday to Saturday, the 73-year-old recalls being directed to Whitley Bay seafront as the best place to have a Sunday lunch… in late November.

“Oh God, I don’t know if I want to tell you this story. So I went to Newcastle Station and got a taxi to Whitley Bay. I’m in this cab for what seemed like four-and-a-half years and we arrived in this beach area.

There was just me and two dogs, or one may have been a big cat, “I was walking up and down and then, there it was and it was open. I went in and there was me and a couple of tourists who couldn’t speak English and were keeping out of the rain. I had the roast beef and it was wonderful and I come out at 3.30pm and went to the taxi rank. It’s now raining stair-rods and after 25 minutes I’m feeling like the dog and cat.

A fella tells me that taxis only come down in the summer ‘you don’t get taxis now’. I said ‘I need to get to Sunderland’ and he said ‘well you can get to Newcastle on the Metro train service’.

So I got to the station but there’s no one there and I’m standing by this machine like a bedraggled old geezer and had to ask a girl of about 14 how to get a ticket to Newcastle. She got this ticket out of the box and said ‘you’d better hurry up because that’s your train’ and I dashed across to the other platform.

“Now I’m on the train and listening to my ipod and I know there are six stops to Newcastle. I count the stops to five and then realise I’m the only one on the train. I look up and all the windows are full of snow and the train has halted. I’m thinking about being trapped by the snow and all of a sudden a black thing goes over the window like a windscreen wiper and then there’s a fella looking at me with a squeegee in his hand and he’s mouthing to me like a goldfish ‘what are you doing in there?’ and he signals me to go around the other side and I’m in a siding where the trains are washed. I told him ‘I’m supposed to be in Newcastle’ and he says ‘Didn’t you hear the announcement that it comes off here on a Sunday’.

“I told him about the earphones and he said that to get to Newcastle ‘was over there about 400 yards away but beware of the middle line’. I said ‘what’s wrong with the middle line?’ and he said ‘if you touch that you’ll be dead’. So now it’s pouring with rain and I’m tip-toeing over everything that could be the middle line and I get to the station and then on to Newcastle. By the time I got to Sunderland it was 7.30pm and I was soaked, bedraggled but alive... how’s that for a bloody story?”

When I ask him if it put him off ever going to Sunderland again, Steele replies: “It’s not Sunderland’s fault, it shows you what a thickie I am. Anyone with brains would know you don’t take a cab to Whitley Bay and I shouldn’t have let it go. I should have said ‘wait here I’m going to go and have lunch and then you can take me back to Sunderland’. It was a whole series or errors and when I told the kids at the theatre they all dined out on that story for weeks.”

I do manage to get a laugh from him by suggesting he has competition for the role of Scrooge this year... the coalition government.

“Yes, I can become the Minister for Parsimony. Sadly I can’t come out of character and use a line like that on stage, but I could work coalition in somewhere,” says Steele who loves the transformation from Mr Nasty to Mr Nice for every performance.

“And it’s two-and-a-half hours of great fun before I get there. When I was in the palladium with this production, there was a coach-party there and a woman shouted along the line to a guy at the end ‘whaddya think Harry?’ and he shouted back ‘Great, when’s Tommy Steele coming on?’ “ I move away from Dickens to take up with him the recent TV appearance on BBC1’s The One Show where the unfortunate Jason Manford had told viewers that they were about to see a clip from Half A Sixpence when Steele was “in his heyday”.

“They say there are five great steps in an actor’s life: ‘Who’s Tommy Steele? Get me Tommy Steele. Get me a Tommy Steele-type.

Get me a young Tommy Steele and then Who’s Tommy Steele?’ But I could see the wording was on his tele-prompter. Now everywhere I go I’m told by cabbies ‘hiya Tom, how’s your heyday’,” says the man who has been playing Scrooge for six years and counts it as one of the best five roles he’s ever played.

The showman intends to keep going as long as Bruce Forsyth and reckons to have at least three projects under consideration at any one time.

“The stage effects in theatre today are streets ahead of what ther’s been before and that’s down to computers.

All the lighting and sound is done now and every scene looks a million dollars.”

■ Scrooge, Sunderland Empire, Monday-Saturday. Tickets: £12.50- £34.50. Box Office: 0844-847-2499 sunderlandempire.org.net