YORK has had to wait until the last week of Mister Maker's travels to see the CBeebies arts and crafts hero on his first British theatre tour, Mister Maker & The Shapes Live!

Looking forward to playing the Grand Opera House tomorrow and Saturday, Phil Gallagher, alias Mister Maker, says: "I am so excited! We’ll be singing, dancing and making some amazing arty creations in York. I can’t wait to share the fun with all my Mini-Makers, so join me and my friends The Shapes – Circle, Triangle, Square and Rectangle – for a real arty adventure and get ready to make some noise.”

Mister Maker, a pre-school staple on CBeebies since his 2007 debut, will present a show "packed with loads of arty fun, fantastic songs and even a big ‘make’ for everybody to take part in".

Phil has been on the road since February 6, on the back of 84 shows in six manic weeks of pantomime as Muddles in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre. "I have family spread all over Kent; we're both sides of the Medway so I'm both a Kentish Man and a Man of Kent," he says.

Right now, he is Mister Maker once more, an interactive arts and crafts enthusiast who emerged from humble beginnings in a small Maidstone studio, armed with nothing more than some coloured card and a tube of gloopy glue and is now watched by children in more than 100 countries.

"This may be the first UK tour, but I've done a lot of shows abroad, starting about five years ago to help to promote CBeebies oversees," says Phil. "So I've done live shows in Jakarta, Indonesia; Hong Kong; Singapore; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Johannesburg, South Africa two years ago; Cape Town, the year before that."

York Press:

Mister Maker's art show

Mister Maker has such pulling power that he has performed to 20,000 fans in Indonesia and sold out 16 consecutive shows in the Playhouse at Sydney Opera House last year in a "dream come true to play there", as well as drawing 30,000 "Mini-Makers" to a fortnight of shows on his second sold-out Australian tour.

"Because we did so well with the Sydney shows, we'll be in the big concert hall when we go back and my mum and dad will be coming over for that," says Phil.

"Then in the UK in the past couple of years, I've done shows at Butlins, 45-minute performances at Minehead, Bognor Regis and Skegness that have been really good fun."

Once the tour finishes tomorrow, he won't be resting. "I'll be going off for another tour of Australia and New Zealand in June and July the week after York," he reveals.

What makes Mister Maker such an international hit? "At its heart the TV show has arts and crafts and that's a universal thing, and it doesn't matter how old you are," says Phil. "It was something I loved doing as a child and I feel privileged to be doing it as a job now. The show has a comic spirit to it and it's very visual and we hope that children come to the live shows and really enjoy them."

Phil's latest challenge has been to take Mister Maker's magic table-top and his doodledrawers from the television studio to the stage for the debut UK tour. "When I sat down with my blank canvas and my pad to start thinking about how I was going to do this, that was the trickiest part: thinking of how we could transfer it from being an arts and crafts show with close-ups on TV, so we still have cameramen to beam everything on a screen," he says.

"But I also wanted to exceed people's expectations and not just do the TV show on stage but to expand on that. So adults will come along because they enjoy watching their children enjoying themselves, but like at a pantomime, we want there to be something for them to enjoy too, so we've worked with Evolution Pantomimes, who did the Canterbury panto and do the Sheffield Lyceum one too.

"They're run by Paul Hendy, a kids' TV presenter, who's a great scriptwriter, so we've worked together on this show. In practical terms, we decided to ask volunteers to come up to the stage, not just children but adults too."

The Mister Maker show in York will combine live action with graphics and a variety of animation techniques as children learn how to paint with the edge of a cardboard box, make a dog out of an egg-box and use rubbish to make a 3D painting.

Once he leaves the Grand Opera House, Phil will have only one show to do: the 100th of the tour, at the Watford Colosseum, and already he is thinking of what to do next. "I'm a person who never likes to keep still," he says. "I keep a pad with me at all times, and throughout this tour, I've been writing down ideas for the next tour and the next TV series."

Mister Maker And The Shapes Live!, Grand Opera House, York, tomorrow at 4pm; Saturday, 10am and 1.30pm. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york 

Did you know?

There have been six Mister Maker series so far, including Mister Maker Around The World, filmed in Britain, Australia, Hong Kong, South Africa and Brazil. Phil Gallagher will be presenting the seventh series, Mister Maker’s Arty Party, this year on CBeebies.