THEY were not your average groupies. Peter was 71, immaculate from his shiny shoes to trilby hat; Mike, 66, shoes also gleaming, in evening shirt and hand-tied bow tie and every-day trousers.

They were waiting for their ‘star’ – Peter hoping for an signature to the autobiography he had tucked under his arm, and Mike to exchange memories of when he gave a badminton racquet to the man many years ago.

They stood outside the Red Lion pub with a full view of anyone walking up Gloucester Street. Others, men and women of a similar age group, kept siege on the stage door of the New Theatre. It was more than an hour to curtain up, but no-one would risk being ‘given the slip’.

After all, Tommy Steele – in Scrooge – doesn’t come to the New Theatre every day.

As they waited, Peter, who was born in Nottinghamshire, told me he was from a Royal Air Force family, and had himself spent 37 years in the service. He now lives in Faringdon.

Londoner Mike, from Hemel Hempstead, served most of his 22 years’ service in the Army as an officer’s batman. Each was ‘theatrically-inclined’; Peter is a well-known magician in his neck of the woods. Mike is an Elvis impersonator.

We waited and waited, at one point reciting The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, until eventually this man emerged from the market, in a shabby coat and hat with ear-warmers. No-one looked less like the chap who had charmed the world as Tommy the Toreador, Kipps in Half a Sixpence or Og the leprechaun in Finian’s Rainbow. But he didn’t fool the group.

Mobbing was gentle and the famous Steele smile shone. The magic was still there.

* I STILL felt a glow when I caught the bus to Water Eaton park-and-ride, unprepared to tolerate a miserable co-passenger, circa 75.

“Why the hell must Oxford always play schoolteacher?” he asked everyone, but not waiting for or wanting an answer. “It’s everywhere you go – even on this bus.”

He pointed to a monitor whose screen not only supplied details of the bus and coach services, but also gave a bit of history to help relieve boredom on journeys to and from the city.

“Who gives a damn that Oliver Cromwell besieged Charles I in South Parade? Who is interested that St Margaret’s Road used to be Rackham Lane and who could care less that such-and-such church is a cruciform early English Gothic revival building designed by AM Mowbray – whoever he is?” I was tempted to put him straight, as the saying goes, but was stopped by an elderly chap with an air of the academic.

“Leave him be,” he advised. “He probably from Cambridge. It’s called jealousy.”