HOW big are your feet?

Even among friends, that might seem a strange question to ask out of the blue, but it was to lead to Clive Mantle’s role as the late, great comedian Tommy Cooper in a marathon tour of Jus’ Like That!

“An old mate of mine, Patrick Ryecart, holds the rights to the show, and one day, when we working on Holby City, he asked me my shoe size,” says Clive, who visits York for one night only in John Fisher’s play at the Grand Opera House on Monday.

As chance would have it, Mantle and Cooper are both size 13½ and share the same height too, 6ft 4ins. “So it started from there,” says Clive, who was playing Dr Mike Barratt in Holby City at the time of Ryecart’s question.

Last May, he wrote to the producers, politely suggesting that “if you’re not doing anything right now, it’s my turn to play Tommy Cooper”. They rang back straight away, and lo and behold, Clive is now undertaking a tour of more than 100 shows in 60 venues, relishing filling such big shoes.

“As an actor, you can either shrivel up or jump in with both feet, and if you get a chance like this, why wouldn’t you swim in the man?” he says.

The role of Tommy Cooper in Jus Like That! was played first by Jerome Flynn eight years ago, and the show has been reworked by John in liaison with Mantle and director Ryecart for the new tour. “We didn’t want it to be just an hour of Tommy’s patter and then a half-hour monologue in the second half,” says Clive.

The show still presents a warts-and-all account of Cooper’s career, albeit with the emphasis on the humour and magic of the fez-wearing funny man who died in 1984 at the age of 63, but with more dramatic emphasis on his descent into drink and relationship with his stage manager, Mary Fieldhouse, at the start of the second half.

“You can’t escape he led his life on a knife edge. Tommy was a genius on stage but a shambolic wreck off it, sadly. On one side of his life, his name was up in lights, but the other was spent drinking himself into a stupor, working out of run-down, damp dressing rooms,” says Clive.

Where previously the show was a solo vehicle, now Clive is joined by Carla Mendonca, who plays a showgirl in the first half and Mary after the interval.

“The second half now opens with Mary trying to put Tommy together in his dressing room, almost like rebuilding Frankenstein’s monster, to get him back on stage when he has his face in the bottle – but it’s still a humorous scene because of his lines. Then, bosh, we’re back to Tommy on stage, in a slightly more inebriated state.”

Clive never saw Tommy Cooper perform live, but he has worked with his son, Thomas Henty, who regaled him long into the night with tales of his father.

Such valuable information was bolstered by watching tapes of Cooper’s shows. “On the early ones, he was so on the ball and alive, but, on the later ones, when he was drinking, he could disguise it to some extent, except that it was so extreme in his case. His balletic movement was still extraordinary but he was a bit wobbly.”

Clive can remember his teenage days of watching Cooper’s final years on TV, when Tommy’s eyes had faded from a bright to a watery blue.

“But there was such huge affection for him that he had everyone willing him on, though he was in a tailspin pulling himself toward a very terrible, sad, early death. But who presses the button to say you can’t perform any more? No one could tell Tommy that.”

Clive’s own affection for Tommy is ever present. “I’m just trying to get the greatest slice of Tommy that I can on stage. I’ve studied each bit of patter, each trick; I know where he turns his head, when he touches his lapel; I copy his movement, I copy his spirit, and if we talk about the essence of Tommy, maybe it was that he trained as a boxer, so he would knock you back with one line, then look to knock you out with the next one,” he says.

The revival of the nostalgic Jus’ Like That! could not be better timed, reckons Clive.

“There’s a mass reaction against the machete comedy of Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand and Frankie Boyle, where, if someone sticks their head above the parapet, they get their head taken off at the shoulder by some two-bit comedian feeling they have the right to insult them,” he says.

“But there’s a whole new university generation that is adopting Tommy… and it’s part of my job with this show to prolong the memory.

“Tommy cheered me up every time I saw him on the telly, and to have that effect on a mass audience proves that laughter is the best medicine – and we all need a laugh at the moment.”

Jus’ Like That!, A Night Out With Tommy Cooper, starring Clive Mantle, Grand Opera House, York, Monday, 7.30pm. Tickets: £14 to £22 on 0844 372 7272.