Well, dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians, but it seems that not only do dreams come true but nice guys don’t always finish last.

On 8 February, 2001, Richard Thomas, alone at a piano, performed the incomplete first half of his brainchild Jerry Springer: the Opera to seven people at London’s Battersea Arts Centre – and got a standing ovation.
Thomas offered the audiences who came over the next few nights free beer in exchange for feedback on the show. Four days later it was selling out.
He had long numbered himself among The Jerry Springer Show’s legion of fans. But he was probably the only one who watched and dreamed of turning it into an opera: “It’s got tragedy. It’s got violence. There are people screaming at each other and you can’t understand what they’re saying,” he says, fondly. “It’s perfect for opera.”

Thomas always wanted it to be big. Two acts. Full stage. A proper opera. And that’s exactly what it is. Starting with one man, a Battersea studio piano, no money and a half-hour performance in February 2001, Rich’n’Jerry then added comedy writer Stewart Lee in May 2001, basic funding from two producers in August, a musical director and an embryonic second act in September, a full second act, another producer, a septet of production creatives and a cast of 20 for the concert version in Edinburgh in August 2002 and a new cast of 33, a band of eight and all that Nick Hytner’s National Theatre can offer in 2003.

En route the show has been rewritten and reworked more times than Tony Blair’s reasons for war with Iraq, and its writers have turned down offers from nearly a score of UK and Broadway theatre producers and international opera houses.

It is undoubtedly in large part due to Lee and Thomas’s astoundingly unegotistical attitude to reworking the piece that it has travelled so far. They are a marvellous combination, at once self-critical and mutually complimentary and still, after two years of work, looking for ways to improve the piece.
Thomas says he actually likes rewrites and, having worked extensively in television, he does them really quickly. Lee too has experience of television. He is too nice a bloke to accuse of bitterness but his experience with the legacy of John Logie Baird has frequently been less than positive and he is revelling in working with a producer like Hytner, whose suggestions for changes are driven by a desire to better the piece, as opposed to tweaking it in line with the latest edict from the advertising boys.

Edinburgh was their turning point. It was their “out of town try-out”. “I thought this show would never be financially possible,” says Lee. But the twin angels of Avalon and Allan McKeown waved their magic cheque books and Jerry not only went to the ball but danced off trailing rave reviews.

The boys had been keen to see how what they generously refer to as the “intelligent, sophisticated, theatre-going” Edinburgh audiences would react to the show. Now they are equally keen to see how its newest audience will take to it.

Jerry Springer is about to go where neither trailer trash nor new opera has gone before – The Royal National Theatre, whose box office, Thomas says, grinning, is ringing with a constant chorus of phonecalls from their regular audience demanding, “I want two tickets to your new opera”, swiftly followed by ” … who is this Jerry Springer person and what does he do?”

The original creative team remains in place. But now they have help. “At Battersea we had to do everything,” says Lee. “I’m constantly coming in and thinking, ‘Ooo I must sort out the lighting plot’, and, of course, someone’s done it. There’s even a staff director who can take people off and go through things.”

The two-year journey to the South Bank has been a learning curve. Lee has newfound respect for commercial theatre.

He remembers his reaction to discovering that their musical arranger had last worked on Mama Mia. It wasn’t positive. “But,” says Lee, “he did all these wonderful arrangements.” He no longer looks at things from what he refers to as his “little smug Fringe comedy circuit ghetto”. Of course, their comedy backgrounds are a huge plus – in knowing when something’s not working, and in working with the cast. “Thirty-three people in a room,” points out Lee, “that’s quite a big audience for a stand-up.” Many more are no doubt filling the Cottesloe tonight. And it remains to be seen how Jerry will go down at the National. If there is any justice in a world where mothers marry horses, fathers become lesbians and girlfriends sleep with their boyfriends’ whippets, he will.

Jerry Springer: The Opera is at the National Theatre, London, until 5 July. Tel: 020 7452 3000