One of my favourite movies is The Talented Mr Ripley. It’s a great thriller with superb acting and direction. I’m very drawn to the lead character, Tom Ripley. He is bright, well read, plays the piano, loves art and appreciates culture. All things I aspire to be. He’s also ruthless psychopath, which I try not to be.

What was the first record you bought? People my age usually say something cool like Led Zeppelin or The Who. Mine was "Puttin’ on the Ritz" by the Pasadena Roof Orchestra. By the time I was eight I knew all the words to ”Yes, Sir! That’s My Baby" and could whistle perfectly the middle eight of "There’s a Rainbow ‘Round My Shoulder".

“Williams and MD Martin produce 80 minutes of sheer joy for their audience” 

There are, of course, a couple of labels to describe this kind of evening – “easy listening” and “feel-good”; there’s another term that I can vouch for as being more than applicable: crowd-pleaser.

As a Sinatra guy, My Way has been my go-to encore, pretty much since I started singing. It ticks all the boxes: it’s emotive, dramatic and very popular. Too popular, as it happens.

I love the way the Spanish deal with age. Instead of asking "How old are you?" they ask "How many years do you have?" which us much nicer, don’t you think?

It was the highlight of my year. A chance to see one of my childhood hero’s close-up. When most eighteen year-olds in the late 80s wanted to see sexy, chart-toppers Duran Duran, I wanted to hear a talk by Chancellor of the Exchequer for Margaret Thatcher, Nigel Lawson.

“A wonderful performer with a great voice – a great idea for a Christmas stocking filler for anyone who loves the standards – and who doesn’t?” Nick Wakeman, Musical Theatre Review

Here’s my version of Ave Maria - a special song for me, and I am sure for many of you too. It’ll be in this year’s Christmas show.

I nearly died a few years ago, alone in a cheap hotel room in Florida. I’d scoffed half a bag of Trail Mix before realising I was having an allergic reaction to the hazelnuts. My throat felt as though it was slowly closing up and within a few minutes I could hardly breath. Being English and not wanting to make a fuss and didn’t call for a doctor, I had a glass of water and kept my fingers crossed. It passed and here I am.

This week, 11 years ago, I was on board the QE2 for her last sailing into Southampton. With the world’s media on standby for her historic return, she ran aground on the sandbanks in the Solent. Whoops.

It was the early 90s and I was playing Billy Bigelow in an amateur production of Carousel. It was the dream scene towards the end of the show where the chorus sings You’ll Never Walk Alone and I had to walk across the stage in slow-motion, like Steve Austin in the opening credits of the Bionic Man…

I make my living entertaining people. I basically get paid to show-off and when I’ve finished everybody gives me a round of applause (except for that time in Clacton, but we don’t talk about that). You’d probably peg me as an extrovert and that’s how I’ve always thought of myself. And yet, since my 20s, I’ve continually found myself struggling to cope in groups, often preferring my own company and craving ‘quiet time’.

What none of the film crew realised, is that almost everyone likes black pepper on their pizza. So, while the strings quivered and I crooned about broken hearts and moonbeams, all you actually heard was "crunch, crunch, crunch" as another pizza was peppered to perfection.

A film I recorded two songs for is out now on Netflix and proving very popular.

Restaurants that don’t exist, fabricated reviews for shows, computer generated videos… It’s so hard to know what’s real anymore.

“Bells to be rung and a wonderful thing to flung...” Half way through You Make Me Feel So Young at a recent show in London, I noticed a table of three, all with their phones in hand, filming me. They did this for most of the evening, in fact. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be filmed and photographed, I love the attention, but if we spend all of our time behind a lens, aren’t we missing the very thing we’re supposed to be enjoying? 

Imagine watching a movie without music: Jaws without John Williams or Brief Encounter without Rachmaninoff. As good as the script, the cinematography and the actors may be, a film needs the emotional muscle of music.

Here’s a flashback from my days in Stage One, the youth theatre group from my home town of Grimsby, where I got my first experience on stage. I’m playing Joseph, in a loin cloth, condemned to death in a prison cell.