Tim Rice

The week of my cricket team’s annual tour of Cornwall. I formed Heartaches CC in 1973 and 765 games later it is still going strong. Not that I am a key component of the side these days, if I ever was, despite my seven wickets against Mullion in 1991. When I suffered my fourth injury in three of the past four seasons (and one of them occurred when I was minding my own business umpiring) I saw the writing on the scoreboard. I just hope I’m not injured as a spectator this year. For some reason 2025 has been an extraordinarily hectic year, musicals wise. Annoyingly hectic in fact. I know I should be grateful for continued interest in past work but, in my 81st year, I should have spent more days at Lord’s or the Oval than in theatres.

One morning, in early February 1952, the nation learned that the King had died. At school assembly we were told by our headmaster to stand in silence and think about this sad event. I was not sure what to think. We were then instructed to pray for the King. This was more like it; I prayed that he would come back to life, although even to a seven-year-old this seemed a long shot. After another long minute of silence, the piano struck up and we were exhorted to sing ‘God Save the Queen’, which was not an encouraging sign for those who had prayed for the King and were waiting for God’s response. Next day we sang ‘God Save the Queen’ again. This meant only one thing — God had listened and His answer was no.

Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the insane world of musical theatre, I don’t know how to create a hit.’ I am now facing up to the grim fact that my latest effort, From Here to Eternity, is folding after a six-month run at the Shaftesbury Theatre. The publicity has vastly exceeded the interest in the show when it opened last September. Never have the words of Bob Dylan seemed so relevant to me: ‘There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.’ The enthusiasm of the media to report gleefully on Eternity biting the dust has been boosted enormously by the simultaneous, weirdly coincidental, demise of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest effort, Stephen Ward.

My daughter has just got married and a beautiful and lively event it was, moving from her local church in St James’s Gardens to the Dorchester via Routemaster buses. I took the opportunity in my speech to thank many for their efforts to be present but reserved my principal praise not for those who had journeyed from Australia, America and South Africa, but for those who had travelled just a few miles from other parts of London. When you have flogged through hideous traffic at the end of another ghastly working day to attend a wedding in your home town it is always extremely annoying to sit through praise showered upon those from foreign parts who are having a terrific holiday, away from everyday pressures, with a lavish wedding and numerous other social freebies thrown in.