It's a dream come true to play Buddy Holly, actor John Sheridon tells David Behrens.

John Sheridon took his seat in the stalls at the Bradford Alhambra, glanced up at the stage and thought, "I could do that."

He went to extraordinary lengths to prove it.

Sheridon was a jobbing actor, appearing in an improvisational company at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, when he bought a ticket for the musical, Buddy.

"I decided right there that I was going to audition," he says. "I look a bit like Buddy Holly, after all."

First, though, he had to prove he could sing and play guitar as well as act - so he roped in some friends and formed two rock groups, then spent a year playing the roughest pubs and clubs in West Yorkshire.

"Believe me, if you can hold an audience in a pub in Leeds on a Saturday night, you can do it anywhere," he maintains. "The West End pales in comparison."

Eventually, he was invited to audition for Buddy in London. "It was most bizarre. I sat there waiting with dozens of other people, all looking the same. Same specs, same hair, everything."

Sheridon's hunch paid off. Impressed by his ability to play live, the show's producers offered him a stand-in role in the West End production. A few months later, he was playing the lead.

"The show's made up of musicians who act a bit and actors who musish a bit," he says. "It was just a matter of getting up to speed on all the disciplines."

This week, Sheridon is back where he started - in Yorkshire. Now the star of the touring version of Buddy, he's in the middle of a two-week residence at the Grand Theatre, Leeds.

"It means I can get the bands back together," he says. "We're planning a reunion gig this weekend."

Sheridon, who's from Blackpool originally, arrived in Bradford in 1992 by way of Bretton Hall College near Wakefield, where he studied drama.

"My time at the museum was wonderful," he says of the NMPFT's in-house Action Replay Theatre Group. "There were five of us, and we dramatised the stories behind photography, film and television. We wrote and staged all our own material - I had a great time. We'd do three or four different shows a day."

His current role, he says, is "a rock and roll Hamlet".

"Honestly, it's a dream come true for a young actor to play Buddy Holly.

"It's a terrific show. It doesn't pretend to be anything it's not - it's just a good, decent night out."

The West End production of Buddy is now in its ninth year - but the producers insist that the current tour will be the last this side of the Millennium.

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