Beautiful game that struck gold

Out of the blue, Andrew Lloyd Webber invited my wife and me to dinner. We had a fantastically convivial dinner as you would expect, the wine being particularly good.

He asked if I would like to write some new gags for Starlight Express. I said if it ain't broke, don't fix it - Starlight has been running for 14 years. I don't want to be the man who went down in history for spoiling a good thing. I tentatively asked about an original musical, because he hadn't done one based on an original story since Aspects.

We both got very excited and agreed we wanted to do something with a contemporary theme, relevant to now, not a costume or a historical piece - although actually as it has turned out The Beautiful Game is vaguely historical in that it is set a generation ago in Northern Ireland in 1969.

I was particularly interested in people being brought up in a culture of violence. During the Serbian invasion of Kosovo there were these awful scenes of completely ordinary kids dressed in Next and Gap fashions on the telly saying their parents were murdered last night and their disco was blown up this morning. Inevitably we got talking about Northern Ireland.

Andrew had seen a documentary on a football team in Northern Ireland in 1969 which struck me as a fantastic vehicle for a saga - although our story is entirely and absolutely fictitious - about a group of young people who have the misfortune to be born into a time of trouble and how ordinary people can't live ordinary lives if they happen to live in extraordinary circumstances.

The Beautiful Game has been one of the best jobs I've ever had. Some people have asked me why I did this. Well, just think about it. Every morning an envelope arrives on a motorcycle and inside is an original Lloyd Webber song which no one else has heard yet. I've always loved his work since I was in Joseph as a kid at school.