MENTION the name Tommy Steele and those who remember the 47 year career murmur "isn't he dead?" Far from it, the 66-year-old bounces down the stairs of Newcastle Theatre Royal's foyer to captivate a new generation of youngsters who are about to become his co-stars in a touring musical version of Scrooge.

The long, collar-length hair, unfashionably large denim jeans and tweed-style jacket cultivates the air of one of Britain's first rock stars, but the twinkle-eyed greeting "watcha kids" rolls back the years to shows and films like Half A Sixpence which put his name in lights.

Soon he's guiding the North-East Stagecoach youngsters through a tricky "smile-by-numbers" photocall before retreating back to the theatre's splendid Matchams restaurant to reveal his reasons for playing a Christmas-hating curmudgeon rather than his customary streetwise cheeky chappie.

Of course, ask a great entertainer a question and he answers you with a story, and discusses people rather than places. So what possessed him to take on Scrooge?

"I've known Bill Kenwright (the producer) since we played in the same football team as teenagers when he was young rising actor as I was a rock 'n' roll performer.

"We'd never worked together in 50 years and he rang me up and said 'I want you to do a show with me. I've got a Dickensian character that's really going to test you. this is a person who is spurned by unrequited love and spends their life with scorn and bitterness. I said 'blimey you want me to play Miss Haversham'. No he said it's Scrooge.

"Bill Kenwright said the only difficulty I had was the 15 minutes at the end when Scrooge is nice. . . the rest of it you can just play yourself.

"So we had all sorts of meetings with creator Leslie Bricusse and it was a marathon of a role and all I could think about was visions of parents taking their kids for a lemonade and saying 'he wasn't like that when I was a kid'."

He calls the role of Scrooge a twoedged sword because it's a "bloody good part" but one he feared because he'd never played the heavy before.

"I've played Buttons, I've played leprechauns, jesters and I've gone from Gilbert and Sullivan to Shakespeare. But if the last 15 minutes of the show wasn't in the book I don't think I'd have the guts to play it."

Steele's first theatre appearance was just down the road at the Sunderland Empire in 1956. He was just out of the merchant navy and helping to create a band of music fans called teenagers when, previously there had just been parents and children.

"I'll never forget it. To start off with I arrived at the theatre I was 19 years of age and I'd been off the ship about five weeks. I walked into a theatre for the first time in my life carrying an electric guitar, an amplifier with a four-piece backing group. I was playing an instrument that most people hadn't seen before. "I was standing on the stage at 9am in the morning because I was told to be available for the band call and to meet the Watch Committee for any dialogue. They were out there in the dark listening to the comedians going through their gags - 'you can't say bum, you can't say God' that sort of thing.

"I'm going twang, twang, twang on the guitar and all of a sudden down to the pit rail came the Mafia.

Four fellas in great big heavy overcoats. One of them said 'excuse me, but are those electricals' referring to the guitar. 'Do you intend to sing through the microphone?' I said 'yes' and he replied 'not in this theatre, you can't bring electricals into this theatre and touch the microphone, it's a fire risk'. I said 'it's rock and roll' and he said 'I don't care if it's f****** rock of ages, you're not going to use electricals'.

"I said 'you can stuff it then, I'm going home' and I walked off stage.

"I swear on my eyesight I was brought back and the management told me that they'd come to an arrangement. So I went on that night and sitting in the corner of the stage, in sight of the audience was a fireman in full uniform with a fire blanket on his lap and a bucket of sand by his side. I did the whole week with him sitting there."

His first memories of Newcastle are arriving home after being away for two years as a cabin boy with Cunard liners.

"My mum, unbeknown to me, had come to meet the ship. I remember walking right past her and not seeing her and she never recognised me because I'd grown from four foot ten inches to something like five foot seven and I was wearing an American Brooks Brothers suit and I had a pink shirt and charcoal grey tie, which was the big thing, and she burst into tears when she realised it was me.

She came running after me and said 'I last saw you as a 15-year-old boy and all of sudden a man came out of the dock gate in a wisp of smoke'."

Steele has no intention of taking things easy and admits: "Actors are not like old soldiers, they don't fade away. You think 'I'll just do my concert tours. I'll walk on the stage with an orchestra and do two hours, just me and the audience and I'll be happy with that for the rest of me life'. . . and then this bloody thing comes along."

He still goes running most days and plays tennis as many days as possible, but confesses that he doesn't do much exercise while he's working on a show until he feels it's bedded in. "At the moment the chances of me seeing a tennis racquet are pretty remote."

Despite having pledged himself to a tough six-month tour, which started out as six-week run, Steele knows his hardest task isn't the transformation from miser to Mr Nice. It's providing the holiday he promised to his wife this year before agreeing to a tour which includes Liverpool for Christmas.

"She said 'well I don't fancy Christmas in Liverpool' and I've told her it will be Barbados when I finish in Scrooge." It'll certainly cost more than half-a-sixpence these days.

Scrooge runs October 27November 8 at Newcastle's Theatre Royal. Box office: 0870 905 5060