WE moved here," said Tom Clarke-Hill, "to get away from the drive-by shootings in LA. "Droitwich doesn't have drive-by shootings - it has drive-by shoutings.

"And the last one of those was two years ago when a guy drove down the street yelling about mushy peas."

Tom Clarke-Hill, as you may gather, can do a stand-up comedy act.

He is also a fine musician and an actor, although in his most recent coup, he will sadly be anonymous, because he's landed the role of the voice of Tony the Tiger in the Kellogg's Frosties commercial.

You know the one, "They're GRRREAT!"

California-born, but now living in a leafy cul-de-sac in the Spa town, Tom will hardly rate the cereal ad as his claim to fame.

One wall of his home is covered with photographs of him with the good and the very good - Tony Bennett, Bob Hope, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Clint Eastwood, Donnie and Marie Osmond, Liza Minelli, George Shearing etc etc.

There's even one with Frank Sinatra.

Tom was in the band backing Sinatra, when during a break, he asked Ol' Blue Eyes if he minded having his photograph taken with him.

As Tom quickly sat down next to Sinatra, a dozen other opportunist snappers fired off.

"What d'they think this is, a f******g wedding!" drawled Frank.

In a sense, Tom Clarke-Hill was born to boogie, for both his parents were musicians.

"I grew up around jazz," he recalled. Now he plays consummate double and electric bass and can fit into any group that needs his services, from big swing bands to small combos.

Propped up in a corner of the room was a lovely old double bass.

"My grandfather bought that for ten dollars in Alberta, Canada in 1913," he says, and then returns me to the picture wall, where there is a sepia shot of that same grandfather sitting on the sidewalk of an Irish town with three fellow musicians, during a mission to bring jazz to the Emerald Isle.

Tom might have stayed a musician had it not been for a stint on the cruise ships, where from his seat in the band, he studied the stand-up comedians.

"I'd always done impressions. I was always the kid in school in trouble for foolin' around," he added.

"So I began to introduce some comedy into some of the numbers.

"I'd do the Louis Armstrong thing in Hello Dolly and I worked out a version of Misty, which included 16 voices - John Wayne, Richard Nixon, Johnny Mathis, people like that."

Much of the time, Tom was playing with the world-famous Les Brown and his Band of Reknown, but he freelanced on recording sessions with artists such as Dolly Parton, Patti LaBelle, Luther Vandross, Kenny Rogers and many more.

Back in LA, he decided to try acting and after "doing a Ginny Tyler course", landed his first job - a voice-over for Japanese and Russian cartoons being re-dubbed for the American market.

"It was difficult trying to sync your voice to characters that had originally been speaking Japanese or Russian," he laughed.

Alongside voice-overs for commercials, he also got into films, with marginal exposure.

"I did one called Entrapment in which three days filming resulted in six seconds on screen.

"In Hackers I had a line in the shower scene - 'Freeze, get outta here' - and in Death Wish Five I heard my voice and saw my shadow!"

In 1993, Tom and his English wife Jacqui, whom he had met when she was a croupier on the cruise ships, moved from Los Angeles to Droitwich.

It was a safer place, they decided, to bring up their young family.

"Also I was having to spend a lot of time away with the band," he said. "I didn't want to become a road warrior, playing in a different place ever night. I'd seen too many marriages fail because of that.

"I wanted to spend time with my wife and kids."

Even so, as we spoke, the phone ran continuously, either for Tom Hill the actor, Tom Hill the musician, Tom Hill the voice-over specialist or even Tom Hill the father of four.

You might have seen him recently in an episode of the Sunday night drama Heartbeat, playing an ex-US airman re-visiting the Yorkshire village and getting a pint of beer poured over his head for his troubles.

But you probably won't know that Tom's voice-over on Amazing Animals on the Disney Channel was nominated for an Emy Award and only pipped to the post by Sesame Street.

Oh yes, he also plays in his own modern jazz group Tom Hill and the Straitjackets and he's done the Wash 'n' Go commercial.

Tom Clarke-Hill's got more hats than Ladies Day at Ascot. And that's worth a drive-by shouting anywhere.