AT the age of six Paul Gregg was given his first taste of the theatre when he was taken to a show as a reward for going to the dentist.
Gregg, the eldest of three children, was born and brought up in Yorkshire during the second world war. He had planned to join the merchant navy when he left school at the age of 18. But when his mother became seriously ill he decided to stay in England to be near her and got a job as a trainee manager at the ABC cinema in Sheffield.
After a couple of years he joined a company that operated cinemas, and then worked for Southport council organising its leisure services before being given the job of running the Apollo theatre in Manchester, a former cinema that had been turned into a music venue.
By the time he was 30, however, Gregg realised he wanted to run a place of his own. So when he heard that the New Theatre in Oxford was up for sale, he and his wife, Nita, bought the lease for £25,000, borrowing the money from an accountant friend who came in as a partner.
“We had never run a theatre before but the New Theatre hadn’t been doing particularly well and we thought we could make a difference,” said Gregg.
The first few years were hard work but they managed to make enough to live on and soon Gregg was itching to buy more theatres. He bought the freehold of the Apollo in Manchester and then the Apollo in Glasgow, the Manchester Palace and Opera House and the Bristol Hippodrome.
But then he made a big mistake: he decided to change the name of the New Theatre to Oxford Apollo so all his theatres would be Apollos.
“The New Theatre had traditionally been the heart of Oxford’s theatre life and, when we decided to change it, people felt we had stabbed them in the back,” he said. Since then, they have left theatre names untouched.
The Greggs were soon on a roll again. They bought the Apollo Victoria in London and had an immediate hit there with The Sound of Music, which ran for more than two years.
But in 1982 the Greggs made their second mistake. They decided to try producing a show themselves and, after seeing Richard Harris play King Arthur in Camelot on Broadway, they brought it to London.
“When we saw the show in New York, I went to sleep in the first half with jet lag but I came back to London absolutely convinced that Richard Harris in Camelot was a good idea. So we put it on and had fantastic previews — and then got the most dreadful reviews. Suddenly what was record-breaking business in the West End disappeared into the worst business in the world.”
The show ran for only eight weeks and Gregg ended up losing £750,000. “It was a big lesson. I realised that making money out of producing shows is a specialist business and you have to be single-minded about it. The truth is we should have stayed theatre owners.”
Fortunately, their luck soon changed again. Andrew Lloyd Webber chose to put on his new musical, Starlight Express, at the Apollo Victoria and it played there for 17 years.
Gregg and his wife continued to expand the business by buying more theatres until by 1999 they had 26 theatres, 10 cinemas and a handful of bingo halls. Their final purchase was the Lyceum in London’s Strand, which has become home to the successful musical The Lion King.
By this time Gregg was 58, and when he was made a generous offer by an American company, it was hard to refuse. “We were very 50/50 about it but, the truth is, we were running a family business and all of a sudden we found out we had 5,000 people in the family. Also, after buying the Lyceum, I was not sure where the business was going. We couldn’t just keep buying theatres.”
Gregg sold the business for £120m net of debt, of which 82% went to him and Nita. He stayed on to work for the new owners, but realised it was a bad idea and left after two years.
He did not leave empty-handed; he and Nita decided to buy back the cinemas and bingo halls for £22m.
“It seemed like a good business opportunity and we thought we would have a go.”
The company has almost doubled in value since they took it over and is expected to have sales of £7m this year.
Indeed, Gregg has not taken the idea of retirement too seriously. Five years ago he became a leading shareholder of Everton Football Club, investing £7m of family money, and he is now a director of the club. He also started up his own executive-jet company, Gregg Air, after buying an aircraft of his own and realising there was a demand for a charter service. The operation is expected to have a turnover of £10m this year.
Now 63, and with a personal fortune estimated at £127m, Gregg said he had never been driven by the idea of making money.
“For me it has been being able to prove that I could make it work. And it has been the excitement of doing the deal, of walking out of Cameron Mackintosh’s office having signed up two years of tours of Les Misérables and thinking: ‘Well, that was a good day.’ Those are the things that made me tick.”
