Ringo Starr on being Thomas the Tank Engine's first narrator

[TMC]

https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/ring...est-worst.html

How you were convinced to become Thomas the Tank Engine’s inaugural narrator

That was a really wonderful job. The show’s producer came to me with the idea. She said, “We’ve got this book, Thomas & Friends, and we’d like you to narrate it.” I’d never done that stuff before so I was confused when I was approached about it. My kids were into spaceships and stuff like that. Actually, in hindsight, I don’t remember my kids being into a lot of children’s stuff. I thought, Well, I’ve never done narration. I don’t feel I’m going to be good at it. So I sat around for a week. We had a studio in the house at the time, and I just thought, All right, what the hell, I’m going to go and read four stories and send it to them, and if they like it, I’ll do the gig. And they liked it.

It became a lot of stories. The good news about Thomas is it was fun. With the big engines, you could put your body into it. I wasn’t following anybody’s lead. We did the stories in England, and then it turned into filming it in New York. That’s when it became a TV show. Starr starred in one additional season of Shining Time Station as a main cast member, and returned for a Christmas special in 1990. — I was like two feet tall, or even less at 18 inches, with the kids, and we could react to each other. But then after four years, it’s like, “I’ve done enough. Thank you.” So I ended it, and we went out to a nice dinner in New York and I said good-bye to everybody. The mid-’80s were an interesting period in my life. During Thomas, I was playing music and trying to make records, but I wasn’t playing live. Then I wasn’t making records at all, and then everything changed again. Life has a rich pattern of changing. Out of the blue, someone reached out to my lawyer here in Los Angeles and they wondered if I would do a tour. I had nothing better to do. No more Thomas. I said, “Sure.” And then I thought, What are you going to do? And I thought again, I’m just going to call a lot of players up, and I asked them if they wanted to come on the road. All the ones onstage said yes, and that’s how the All-Starr Band started.

[Peppermont]

Originally Posted by TMC

https://www.vulture.com/2023/07/ring...est-worst.html

This is a really great article and recent too.