Picked by Julie Andrews to play the curmudgeonly Colonel Pickering in My Fair Lady, the actor is enjoying his first musical.

I really did grow up listening to My Fair Lady. I was about six or seven, and my parents brought the Broadway recording back from the UK. I remember that strange, white-bearded gentleman in the top left-hand corner of the album cover with Mr Harrison and Dame Julie dangling as puppets under his cloud. I thought it was God – I’d not heard of George Bernard Shaw at that time – but that extraordinary cartoon has been somewhere in my tiny mind ever since.

I was sent to expensive schools where I learned piano and ended up in the school band playing the euphonium. Walking and talking is difficult enough as it is, but marching and playing the euphonium? How I did it back then I have no idea.

^{Tony Llewellyn Jones}

As a kid, I was in the school choir. Most of what was sung was religious – middle Anglican to begin with, sort of creeping up towards high Anglican. But apart from singing in the shower, I was...