In the bar of the Alhambra Theatre, Tony Peers sucks on his cigarette as if drawing blood from it. It has been, he says, an ambition to play pantomime here - but he is a man of modest ambition.

"Esther Rantzen found me in obscurity, and left me there," he laments.

Back in 1980, Peers was picked by the toothsome, former That's Life presenter to appear in a series which, she told him, would make him a star.

He was to be supported by Morecambe and Wise, Ken Dodd, Spike Milligan and Arthur Askey. "This boy's got a great face for comedy," Eric Morecambe told him.

The series was called The Big Time. Perhaps you remember it. Sheena Easton, for one, never looked back after submitting to it.

She's in Hollywood now, but Peers is still in Yorkshire, hanging on to that cigarette end as if it's the last one he's got.

Not that he's complaining. "The show moved me up the scale a little bit, that's all," he says. "I'm a jobbing comic. I have no pretensions about that."

He was hardly a newcomer when Esther earmarked him for the big time; he'd been playing the northern clubs all his life, and putting on his own summer shows in his beloved Scarborough.

He'd even played the opening night of the alternative comedians' Mecca, the Comedy Store in London. The Stage newspaper, the oracle of such things, said he had "a flinty hardness honed in the cauldrons of the north".

Alternative comedy, however, was an avenue Peers chose not to pursue, and today, while he's not perhaps a star in the Esther Rantzen mould, he is an actor and comedian of some repute and one of the country's foremost pantomime dames.

"It was worth doing The Big Time just to meet Eric and Ernie, and to discuss comedy with them" he says. "I had lunch with Eric afterwards."

It is in the capacity of Dame that he will, next Friday, take up residence at the Alhambra for this year's Christmas offering, Dick Whittington.

It will renew a family connection going back some 60 years: his mother-in-law, as a teenager, was one of Francis Laidler's Sunbeams.

"I was in Bradford four years ago, at the St George's Hall, and I looked longingly across to the Alhambra," says Peers. "It's such a legendary place."

He is by no means the first comic to look on the theatre as pantomime's holy grail. His own route to Morley Street involved years of playing Wishy-Washy and Idle Jack up and down the country.

"What happens is that as you get older and more rotund, they force you into the Dame's frock," he says.

"Two years ago I wore a Dame's costume that had been made for Les Dawson, and people said the resemblance was uncanny. Probably because I'm small and fat."

Peers also bears a striking similarity to the great northern comic Robb Wilton, whose career he has studied and whom he played in sketches at Scarborough for many seasons.

"Comedy is a hobby to me and I collect books and recordings," he says. "Those old comedians I adore."

And it is old-timers like Wilton on whom he now models himself. "The thing is, you grow older with your audience. When you play variety houses now, the audiences are 40 upwards. And we all identify with the same things: outside toilets and corner shops and going to school in grey shorts."

Peers' own school days were in Wigan, but Yorkshire's east coast is home now. They called him Mr Scarborough during his seven-year stint at the Spa Theatre there, and he became a director of the town's football club.

He is also increasingly familiar from straight acting roles, having played no fewer than three different characters in Coronation Street and appeared in the recent Bradford-set film, LA Without a Map.

"A bit of straight work now and again" is how he describes all this. "But my core business is stand-up comedy," he insists. "That's what I adore."

This will be his third year as Dame to the Chuckle Brothers, the Rotherham double-act whose long-running TV series has made them heroes to generations of youngsters.

"It's much better when everyone's from the north," says Peers. "Your points of reference are the same."

Last year they were in Darlington; Sheffield before that. "But Bradford has a pantomime tradition," he says. "It's wonderful to be part of that."

David Behrens

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