Gary Wilmot's boss laughed in his face when he handed in his notice.

"Showbusiness!? What kind of a living is that? You want to stay here, mate. You'll have a job for life."

Five years later, they closed down the department. Who'd have thought Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council could be dismantled more easily than a Lego set?

Gary, meanwhile, has done quite nicely thank you since swapping his GLC warehouseman's coat for the regulation entertainer's bow tie.

A TV career in the Seventies impersonating Norman Wisdom led him eventually to the legitimate and musical stages. Last year he scored a major hit as Fagin in Cameron Mackintosh's Oliver! at the Bradford Alhambra. (Great theatre, very dusty car park, he says.)

But it is to his comic roots that he would like to return. He's writing a comedy film, and can see himself, a few years from now, as a British film actor in Wisdom's mould.

"It's early days, and everyone's writing film scripts these days," says Gary, "but this one's nearly finished and with a bit of luck I can put myself in a position to have something done about it."

He began work on it last year, while staying in Haworth during the run of Oliver! "I looked out of the window every morning and saw the Bront sisters' house. I hoped it would inspire me to write more, but it didn't."

Gary, who lists his film heroes as Peter Sellers and Jacques Tati, admits that his cinema experiences to date have not been entirely happy.

His last film, a little-seen drama called Lazarus, was written in Polish and translated into English by the actors as they went along.

"It was its own worst enemy, to be honest," he says. "The story concerned a young African boy who was adopted by American parents living in the Home Counties. One was a drunk, the other was a concert pianist. They paid their money and thought they were going to get a baby to adopt but they ended up with an 11-year-old boy."

Gary played a man from the council (at least he had that down to a tee) investigating the trade in trafficking children.

"I was amazed they got it finished," he says. "But I went to see it and actually it wasn't too bad. I was pleasantly surprised. Wasn't exactly filling box offices the world over, though."

His pursuit of further film work is being interrupted by a season of one-man shows in which he indulges his passion for the great musical numbers popularised by the likes of Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis.

Music To Watch Girls By, his title for the one-night gigs, finds the showbusiness bow tie hanging loose around his neck, Sammy-style. "In a way it's a parody of that stuff," says Gary. "It was a golden era of music, and we've tried to give our audience a flavour of what went on back then.

"We've gone for the kind of songs that remind you of those long summer days. Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head, Windmills of Your Mind."

He seems so comfortable with the image that one wonders if he hankers for those heady showbiz days himself.

"Me? No - I like the business the way it is now. I like the fact that I can do a musical, then a straight play and now this. It's much more varied."

The straight role - the one with which he followed Oliver! - was in Willy Russell's One For the Road, at the Bristol Old Vic. "I love doing straight work," he says. "Actually, it's all straight really. It's just that some of the straight stuff the audience laughs at. But it's the same kind of technique."

He does not have any immediate TV plans, despite everyone in the business saying that traditional variety - his kind of show - is on the way back.

"I don't think it's the way forward necessarily," he says. "I'm not that fussed about TV, really.

"To be honest, I don't know what my next project will be. But that's just the nature of the business."

Perhaps that boss at the GLC was right after all. "These days, whose job is safe?" says Gary. "When I was a boy I wanted to be a football manager. Now that's insecurity for you. The idea of having my career on a knife edge is not something I'd relish."

Showbusiness is not an easy path to wealth, nonetheless. Many a TV impressionist has been reduced within a very few years to scratching a living in the worst of the back street clubs.

Gary, however, found a springboard from the world of the one-liner when he was picked to star in the West End musical, Me and My Girl. He was a smash as the Cockney barrow boy Bill Snibson, and other musical offers followed.

"It was the first time I'd really acted," he says, "and of course I wasn't anyone's idea of a Cockney from 1937 - but luckily enough they thought I carried it off well.

"I learned later that there were frantic phone calls to Stephen Fry, who'd revised the original script, about whether a black man could play the part. He said, 'Why on earth not?'"

Though it will be for one night only, Gary is looking forward to reacquainting himself with Bradford when he arrives with Music To Watch Girls By next month.

"Oliver! was a great time. I was happy, the weather was fine and there were loads of things to do during the day," he says.

What things, exactly? Well, there was the business of washing the dust off his car...

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.