New series beckons after early Chichester Festival Youth Theatre years

It’s too soon to say what the show is but Tom is relishing the challenge. Most likely it will be screened in 2025.

“It's a fantastic cast. I was filming for three weeks and I'm going back up and I'll be working on it until July. It has been fascinating. It's very different to anything I've ever played before. It's a fascinating experience and I've had to do a lot of research.”

As for The Importance Of Being … Earnest?, which played the New Theatre Royal in Portsmouth last November, that too was a great experience – a stage show which offered The Importance of Being Earnest as you have never seen it before… and never will again.

The tour is still on the road. Say It Again, Sorry take Oscar Wilde’s great classic and reinvent it before our very eyes with a mischievousness which would have left even the great Oscar purring with pleasure. The premise is that it all starts normally enough as the company starts to go Wilde, but when a key actor doesn’t turn up, the company, after plenty of fumblings and ditherings, decides to rope in a replacement from the audience. And so it goes on…

“I was with the show for five months,” Tom says. “It was a fantastic show. It's really great and it was a lovely company of actors. It really kept you on your toes. It was never a boring show because you just never knew what was going to happen!”

Tom, who is 29, started originally with Stagecoach at Chichester High School for Boys when he was about four and then joined Chichester Festival Youth Theatre when he was ten or 11: “I started really as a form of therapy. I have autism and when I was growing up, I couldn't really look people in the eyes and struggled to communicate. I would drift off into my own fantasy world where I could actually talk to people, and my parents thought that if I could act it would be good. And it really helped me. I've still got Asperger's Syndrome and for me it actually helps me as an actor. It gives me a different approach.

“I was with the Youth Theatre from the age of about ten until I was 17 and the big thing that I did was Macbeth with Sir Patrick Stewart in 2007. It was set in Soviet Russia in the fall of the Soviet Union and I got to play Fleance. Sir Patrick was such a sweet man. He was really lovely. I remember the first day in rehearsals he came up to me and sat next to me and had a chat. I think I was 13 at the time and he was just so easy to chat to. It never felt like ‘Oh, you can't talk to Sir Patrick!’ And I remember playing volleyball with the man on the football goal posts in Oaklands Park. That's quite a strange memory but the whole company were just lovely.

“Every night was magic but the best memory I have is when I had to go on stage and I had to get something to eat out the fridge, a piece of chocolate cake and Sir Patrick would come on and say ‘How late is the hour!’ and it was great to have this one to one with him but them one night we dropped the plate and it shattered and Lady Macbeth had to come on with bare feet so we had to improvise for a minute so we could get a broom and sweep it all up. And afterwards Sir Patrick was very complimentary about the way we coped. He was very sweet about it!”