‘Steffi Graf went to see it 12 times!’ How we made

‘The German production has had a standing ovation every night for 36 years. Graf went before big tennis competitions to gee herself up. And the German football team would go before an international’

Andrew Lloyd Webber said to me: “I have this story.” It was going to be an animated film based on Thomas the Tank Engine, but animation back in the early 1980s was really expensive, so that never happened. Then we started working on something called Rocky Mountain Railroad. That was going to be a train race across America to see who would have the honour of taking Prince Charles and Diana on a royal tour. There’s history for you. Andrew had a train set in his attic. I’d had one as a boy. It didn’t seem to be a daft idea. The previous show we’d done was people pretending to be cats, so people pretending to be trains wasn’t such a leap.