My show has been 40 years in the making starting in 1981 while I was teaching in Nottingham. Like so many inspirational ideas ‘it’ happened upon me and I was compelled to write it down. As writers know, ideas don’t wait for an appropriate moment to arrive so I found myself writing while in my car in traffic jams, late at night as I was dropping off to sleep and so on. The songs appeared in the style of that great heart throb of the 1930s – Ivor Novello who was a composer and creator of wonderful and hugely popular musicals. I completed it by 1984 but had no idea what to do with it so it went into a box file. Then in 1989 I took it out, made a tape recording of a dramatic precis of the story accompanied by some of the songs and entered it into the Buxton Festival. This was when the name was born suggested by the late, great and hugely talented, Kit Hesketh Harvey,  Needless to say, the competition was fierce and, really, the whole thing wasn’t complete anyway, so along with a rather lukewarm letter from the competiton panel, it went back into the box file and stayed there until December 2023 when a friend persuaded me to take it out and organise a table read with actor friends. The evening was a success and two people very involved in the theatre world, Dave Phipps and Chris Huntley, stepped forward and offered to help me develop it. You can read about in their interesting biographies in another section

All through 2023 we all worked on the existing story and developed it into the story you read today. Needless to say, Dave, my Director and Dramaturg, suggested all kinds of developmental ideas and often suggested I write new songs to punctuate the exciting, romantic or sad moments. Chris, my Musical Director, was at hand to arrange the new tunes and finally Draft 2 of Dear Bernard was born.