Tommy was born in Liverpool, but doesn’t know any of The Beatles.

After an early career as a clown (no, really!), he joined the cast of the West End musical, Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story where he played the Clearlake MC for a total of eight years, including stints on the UK tour and in Toronto, Canada. During his time in Buddy, Tommy devised and ran drama workshops based on the show for the Society Of London Theatre’s Kids’ Week - a project he later repeated for the Queen musical, We Will Rock You.

At this time, Tommy appeared in two feature films: getting beaten up on a bouncy castle in Going Off Big Time, and battling creatures of the undead in Zombie Love Stories. He also learned how to play golf in order to sell popcorn as part of a Butterkist tv ad campaign.

Tommy then moved into the world of theatre production, where he wrote, directed and appeared in theatre tours such as Robinson Crusoe, Hey Diddle Diddle and Goldilocks & The Three Bears. It was here that he also achieved his longstanding ambitions of playing both a panto baddie and dame (doing both at the same time as an Ugly Sister in Cinderella!)

The activities in Tommy’s non-fiction books such as Boredom Busters and Quick Fixes For Bored Kids helped him to become a regular guest on radio stations around the UK as an expert on the subject of keeping children entertained. He even made several appearances on BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright In The Afternoon as the kids entertainment guy.

Tommy writes for a number of magazines, such as the Times Educational Supplement, Practical Professional Child Care, Creative Steps and Scholastic’s Junior Education. He was also one of the writers for the hit CBBC series, Planet Cook and pens occasional tales from the island of Sodor for Thomas & Friends magazine.

As a novelist, Tommy wrote five titles for Egmont Books’ Too Ghoul For School series: Terror In Cubicle Four, Silent But Deadly, School Spooks Day, Attack Of The Zombie Nits and A Fete Worse Than Death. His new series, Scream Street, will be published by Walker Books from Oct ‘08.

In addition to his writing and acting, Tommy also runs creative writing workshops in primary schools across the north of england, teaches writing to adults in the north east and organises storytelling courses for surestart in Northumberland and beyond. He is proud to be the writer-in-residence at Seven Stories, the centre for children’s books in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.

Tommy now writes full-time and lives in Northumberland with his family. He has started to see sleep as a waste of good writing time.