This charming man

Mel Brooks is recording the sound of a cat into my tape recorder. 'This is an alley cat, moping around, looking for food, maybe company,' he says, making a harsh, skulking noise that does indeed sound like a cat prowling around a dustbin.

'And this,' aiming an unearthly squawk straight at the microphone, 'is what happens when a bigger cat, maybe a dog, jumps at him. That's two Mel Brooks impressions recorded just for you.'

Brooks - 78 and, by his own admission, 'short' - is nothing if not charming. 'Your eyes are lovely,' he says at one point. Later: 'I love English girls. And Scottish ones.

I used to meet them in pubs and go drinking on Sauchiehall Street [he was stationed in Glasgow near the end of World War II]. Two beautiful women, one on each arm.'

This sort of digression is typical of Brooks, who's in town to promote the London transfer of his musical comedy The Producers, starring Lee Evans and Richard Dreyfuss and based on his 1968 film.

He also has a habit of randomly breaking into song. Where Did It All Go Right? is one favourite from the show, written by himself, but snippets of Cole Porter and Noel Coward crop up too, delivered with shameless abandon in a chewy Brooklyn voice.

All of which makes it a little tricky to keep Brooks focused. Still, after a lifetime in comedy, his star is shining more brightly than it has ever done before.

Like almost everything he has worked on, the film of The Producers - about two sharks who hit upon the idea of making a fortune by producing a sure-fire flop, and come up with a musical about Hitler - initially split the critics. But with the musical version, he has his first unequivocal hit.

The Producers won a record 12 Tony awards when it opened on Broadway in 2001, created a huge scrum for tickets and was credited with returning a much-mourned vaudeville spirit to New York.

'Sometimes people just wanna watch an old-fashioned love story, laugh at a good joke and sing along to a good song,' he says. 'Broadway had got terribly serious. The Producers came along at the right time.'