Rice revels in latest role as MCC superstar

'I am not a great cricketer but it's quite nice that occasionally somebody who is a cricket lover can get to this great position'

We are sitting in a grand committee room at Lord's, surveying a scene of slightly upsetting devastation out in the middle where the venerable outfield, which is to be relaid with better-draining turf, is being ripped up by several huge and disrespectful mechanical diggers.

Bits of the turf have been sold off to sentimental mugs like me and Tim Rice, bless him, celebrated lyricist and man of 1,001 social graces, expresses great interest in how my square metre of Lord's outfield is getting on. "Very well indeed, thank you," I say, as though it is my granny he has asked after. Truly, cricket breeds a strange kind of enthusiast.

Not every enthusiast, however, gets to become president of the Marylebone Cricket Club, the hallowed title which passed to Rice earlier this week, and which previously belonged to one of the heroes of his (relative) youth, Ted Dexter.

"I am very much aware," says Rice – in that soft, soothing, beautifully modulated voice, as scrumptious, if I might be so impertinent as to use another man's lyric, as a cherry peach parfait – "that I am not a great cricketer, not even a particularly passable one. But it's quite nice that occasionally somebody who is just a cricket lover can get to this great position."

People keep asking him, he adds with trademark self-deprecation, whether a worse cricketer has ever presided over MCC (it is evidently rather infra dig to use the definite article; to members it is MCC, never the MCC)? "And the answer is, 'I don't know'. I'm rather scared that the answer might be yes, but on the other hand somewhere in that lot [he gestures to a board on which the names of his predecessors are inscribed] there must be an earl in 1841 who was really hopeless. I need to find out a bit more about some of those early boys."

Some of the more recent "boys" include, as well as Dexter, two distinguished England captains in Colin Cowdrey and Peter May. When the name of Tim Rice is in due course inscribed on that oak board he will be keeping impressive not to say awe-inspiring company. After all, the first Lord's Test he attended was the famous 1963 match against the West Indies, when E R Dexter made a heroic 70 and M C Cowdrey came in to bat with a broken arm.

"I think I took a girlfriend for her birthday. I'm not sure she even liked cricket that much. I don't think the relationship lasted much longer." While I laugh obligingly he delves back a little further to find a charming anecdote about his Lancing College schooldays. "I remember that in form 2A we had a poll to find out who we would most like to be. Third was Superman, second was Elvis Presley and first was Peter May. I voted for Peter May."

So having established his humility and credentials as a lifelong cricket nut, what of his ambition? Although the position is largely honorary, Dexter came into it almost with a manifesto. What does Rice intend to do with his year-long presidency?

"I have no radical plans, yet. I do want to get to know everybody in the ground, from top to bottom, as far as is possible. And I would like to remind members that they shouldn't think 'what can MCC do for me?' but 'what can I do for MCC?' "

In vain I search Rice's expression for signs that his echo of President Kennedy's inauguration speech is at least slightly tongue-in-cheek. "There are lots of MCC members," he continues, "or let's say an element who might think that the only point [of membership] is getting into Test matches for, in effect, nothing. But there is more to it than that. We have to think what we can give back to cricket. We are 18,000 people of all shades of opinion, yet far too few members feel they have a say. Let's work to keep a love of cricket alive among the younger generation in the face of the sometimes frightening opposition of football.

"And don't let MCC be seen as a privileged enclave for a few old buffers."

That, I fear, might be an uphill struggle while television cameramen at Lord's Test matches continue to focus on men who definitely qualify as old buffers, often dozing, in their egg-and-tomato ties in the pavilion.

None the less, these are not idle soundbites from the new MCC president.

Indeed, it was he who, volubly supported by the late Brian Johnston, first put forward for membership Rachel Heyhoe-Flint, still, bizarrely, England's best-known woman cricketer. "It took three goes but eventually we got her in." Does he know how many women members there are now? "Gosh. Perhaps 20 or 30, I'm not sure. My daughter is an associate member. And associate members now are almost as privileged as full members on the fourth and fifth days of Test matches."

The main responsibility of the president, adds the president, is to be the "public" face of the club. Since Rice has a nice face and great charm I'm sure he will be a terrific success. And as he keeps on emphasising, he is fully aware of his limitations. "I'm not sure I should get into pure cricketing matters, airing an opinion on what should happen to the lbw law," he says. "Although I have my views, of course."

Which are? "Gosh. Well, I don't think there is any major law in need of change and there are some interesting new developments, such as the new 20-over game, in which, as I understand it, each team can pick one over beforehand in which all runs count double. I'm intrigued to see how that will turn out. It will either be a thundering success or a damp squib."

I had hoped that I might tempt a faintly controversial opinion from him, but of course it was naïve of me to expect a man who has made a sizeable fortune from his felicity with words to select them without care.

Instead we revisit his schooldays at Lancing.

"I played for my house and for the third XI once or twice. But the only sport I was good at was swimming and because I was in the team, I tended to do that in summer. It was nice to be good at something. As a schoolboy cricketer my greatest achievement was to score 100 runs in May, but it was in about five games. I never ever played on the spectacularly beautiful First XI ground, until about 12 years ago when I played for MCC against Lancing. Unfortunately it rained solidly for much of the day and when we did play I was to bat at seven but we declared at four wickets down.

"So I only got as far as padding up, I didn't bowl and I fielded about two balls. But I was very happy standing on that square at last."

It remains the only time he has played for MCC, although he was set to manage an MCC tour to Argentina ("Don't Cry For Me..." is, of course, one of his) until work commitments intervened. "I would still like to do that. I am quite experienced in organising Heartaches tours."

Heartaches is the name of the wandering XI he founded, for whom his greatest feat is a recent hat-trick. "It even made the papers, the 'Basingstoke Bugle', the 'Farnham Times'. And it wasn't a bad one either. One clean bowled, one caught at short leg and one stumped. They weren't Bradman, Hobbs and Grace, but it's still rare. The Heartaches have played 500 matches and there have only been five hat-tricks."

Rice is a slow left-armer in the manner of another of his heroes, Johnny Wardle, the exception being that Wardle got the ball to bounce. "Mine don't always bounce, or not until they reach the third row of the stalls. My dream ball is a chinaman [a leg-break bowled by a left-arm spinner]. I try a chinaman every ball and one in 10 sort of works."

The Heartaches tours Rice has organised have reached destinations as improbable as Germany and North Carolina. "There is a booming cricket scene in North America," he tells me. "Charlotte Cricket Club, which I think I'm president of, was set up mainly by expat South Africans. We played against them and the Mad Dogs of New York, and the Philadelphia Gentlemen, and once you get to the middle you could be in England. The standard's not very high but it's as high as club cricket here and they're tremendously keen.

"Obviously they should forget about trying to compete with baseball, just as soccer will never replace American Football, yet American cricket enthusiasts are saying that they want to have a Test team and that would be wonderful. MCC could play an important part in that. How can we help? Do you need coaching? It would be great if in my lifetime America played a Test match."

The subject of cricket in America, I tell him, always makes me think of the Hollywood Cricket Club and one of its earliest luminaries, Sir C Aubrey Smith, who had played for and captained England. Show business and cricket have always been happy bedfellows. Does Rice, who straddles both camps, know of anyone in the showbiz world as fanatical about cricket as the late Trevor Howard, whose film contracts always stipulated that he had to be released from the set for the duration of a Lord's Test?

"I think Harold Pinter makes himself unavailable for script meetings during Test matches. And I remember when we were recording Evita in 1976 having a row about something with Andrew [Lloyd-Webber] in the studio. He walked out, leaving me with a huge orchestra. There wasn't much point in me standing there, so I went to Lord's."

Has cricket ever featured in his lyrics? "Actually, yes. Andrew and I wrote a little operetta about a cricketer who, as he goes out to bat, sees his girlfriend going off with a racing man. How low can you get? So his dilemma is, does he get out deliberately, hit his wicket, to sort out his private life? Or, as the star batsman, does he stay in, putting side before self? He decides quite rightly to stay, which gives his betrothed, having lost a lot more than her inheritance to the racing man, time to realise the folly of her ways. It was privately commissioned 15 years ago or so."

Nosily, I ask Rice who commissioned it? "Prince Edward, actually, for the Queen's 60th birthday. That's why we put the racing thing in. And in fact the racing man is redeemed, because one of the home side's batsmen is nearly fatally injured by a fast bowler, so the racing man comes in and shares a wonderful last-wicket stand with our hero. I thought it was very funny. I keep saying to Andrew: 'Why don't we record it?' Some of the tunes have since gone into other works but that wouldn't necessarily matter."

Because the words, I imagine, have not been much used since. "No. As a composer, if a tune doesn't work in situation A, you can try it in situation B. You can't do that as a lyricist. You couldn't have put 'Don't Cry For Me, Argentina' into The Lion King. Or if you had, it would have meant a fairly radical change of storyline."

Indeed, I say, with a merry laugh, as behind him a mechanical digger hoicks up another huge piece of the Lord's outfield.

Tim Rice: The life and times

Name: Timothy Miles Bindon Rice

Born: 10 November 1944, Amersham, Buckinghamshire

Known for: His musical collaborations with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. The pair are renowned for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita. In the 1980s Rice began a collaboration with the former members of Abba, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Anderson on Chess, premiered in London's West End in 1985, which went on to become an international success. Has also worked on films such as Walt Disney's 1992 production Aladdin.

In 1994 he was knighted for services to music.

Interests: One of Rice's main diversions outside of the world of music and theatre are a publishing house, Pavilion Books, which he launched in 1981, although his main passion is an enduring love for playing and watching the game of cricket.

A lifelong fan of the game, Riced founded his own team, Heartaches Cricket Club, in the early 1970s, and has been a member of MCC for 10 years.

Recently appointed president of MCC.

Career highlights: Throughout a distinguished career he has won three Oscars, 12 Ivor Novello awards, five Grammys, four Tonys, three Golden Globes and in 1999 was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

He says: 'We all dream a lot, some are lucky, some are not, but if you dream it then it's real, you are what you feel.'

They say: 'I think he was curious to find out why she became this kind of cult figure, this huge figure in Argentina. And I think he became attracted to the story.' Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber on what motivated Rice to produce the musical Evita.

Did you know? Sir Tim won Rock Brain of the Universe in 1985.