TOMMY Cannon - one half of comedy favourites Cannon and Ball - is taking to the stage playing “a bit of a northern Del Boy.”

Tommy, hails from Oldham but now lives in Great Ouseburn, near York. He’s married to Hazel, and they have two daughters and a son, and has two other girls from his first marriage.

Hazel is his “rock, my certainty”, he says, and she’ll be going with him on a new challenge that he’s decided to pick up.

Tommy is joining the cast of Seriously Dead, which also stars Billy Pearce and Crissy Rock, a comedy drama that will tour the UK for many months ahead.

He smiles: “It’s all very different from the act that Bobby Ball and I do, which is structured but also fairly free-wheeling. Bobby still surprises me, even today, doing something that is completely spontaneous. You know something? We’ve been a double act for fifty-five years now, which surely must be some sort of record.

“A stage play means learning lines, for a start - lots of them - and, of course, sticking to them. You can’t wing it and go off-course. The rest of the cast would never forgive you!

"It’s been written by a lass called Leah Bell, who – full credit to her – is also in the cast, and also produces it. In fact, I’d be hard put to it to think of what Leah hasn’t done!

"We met, years back, in Jersey, when we were all doing summer season together. Those days, a summer season would go on for 20 and more weeks, playing to good houses all the time. Then you’d have a few weeks of variety, or some clubs somewhere, and after that there would be at least two months of pantomime. Your year was planned out in advance.

“That doesn’t happen now, more’s the pity, but Leah and Bob and I got on like a house on fire, and we always kept in touch.

"Then, earlier in the year, and out of the blue, I got a call from her, and I thought, ‘It’s new, it’s a great script, and people love it, so… let’s go for it!”

He’s playing the small-time crook and ladies’ man Albert Blunderstone, who, says Tommy, “is best summed up as a bit of a northern Del Boy”.

Asked if he was apprehensive about acting in this new venture without Bobby Ball, Tommy said, “I’ll have a crack at anything, as long as the offers keep on coming.

"You know the two saddest words in the English language? They are ‘if only’. When someone gets to a certain age, and they look back and they sigh and say ‘If only I’d done this… or that’. Of course everyone makes mistakes, but you have to learn from them. That’s the way forward.”

All this from a man who, incredibly, celebrated his 80th birthday in June. “I know”, he laughs, “I can’t believe it either. But it’s true, and I am very blessed, I know that all too well!”

Tommy Derbyshire met Bobby Ball (born Robert Harper) “more years ago than either of us care to recall. We were both working for a manufacturing firm over in Oldham, and I was the new boy – I turned up, and about 500 blokes walked past me without a word.

"Until this little guy went across, and he said ‘Hello, cock, ‘ow are you?’ The only one who actually spoke to me! And that was it. We became mates,

Cannon and Ball’s act was forged in the working men’s clubs of the day, “and we very much learned ‘on the hoof’. It was tough, but it was a brilliant way to learn your craft, what worked and what didn’t.

"I remember very early on we played a North-East audience, Sunderland way, and we were paid off. We were so broke that we actually picked the dog ends out of the ashtrays as we left.

"We stopped the car a few miles down the road, and we looked at each other and we thought over what had happened. We said to each other, ‘Look, we have three more gigs left, we’ll do those, and if they are disasters, we’ll throw in the towel, call it a day.

"What happens? We stormed every one of them, they couldn’t get enough of us!”

Their big break came just as the 70s slid in to the 80s. “It’s an indicator of how tastes change”, says Tommy, “because one minute, every town of any note had at least one decent cabaret club that was thriving, and the big names played them all, and then, almost overnight, the audiences were deserting them, and they were closing.

"Just as that happened, we were offered a three-year contract by London Weekend... and we stayed for many years more! Fate was with us, and we couldn’t have timed it better.”

He admits with a chuckle that he still gets one of the Cannon and Ball catchphrases shouted after him. “If I had a fiver for every time someone has yelled out ‘Rock on, Tommy’ at me, Hazel and the kids and I wouldn’t be living in Great Ouseburn, we’d be able to afford to live in style in Barbados, believe me!”

Seriously Dead, Blackburn Empire Theatre, Sunday, October 14, and Oswaldtwistle Civic Arts Centre, Thursday, October 25.