Only after he came on board did they select the director Phyllida Lloyd.Although this is her first musical, Lloyd is no stranger to the peculiar perils and pleasures of the form, having directed a punchy revival of The Threepenny Opera at London's Donmar. One reason this version has legs is the calibre of its personnel.For starters, the producers secured the designer Mark Thompson, the man behind the look, style and feel of the enormously successful revamp of Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the visually entrancing Doctor Dolittle. The show, the brainchild of producer Judy Cramer, who worked with Benny and Bjorn on their hit musical Chess, has been in gestation for at least 18 months.Previous attempts to dramatise their back catalogue (including the sublimely titled Abbracadabra) foundered, but after two weeks of previews, Mamma Mia opens tomorrow. That led to Abba spear- heading the entire Seventies revival.

The world may have stopped short of reclaiming their ghastly costumes, thanks to the first law of fashion - if you can remember wearing it the first time, don't even think about it the second - but compilation CDs like Abba Gold are selling by the truckload.Small wonder that weeks before opening, advance sales for Mamma Mia, the musical based on Abba songs, were near the pounds 2m mark and climbing. That fateful April night when 500 million people in 32 countries watched a virtually unknown Swedish pop group beat 16 other entries to win Eurovision was so long ago, there was a guest appearance by The Wombles But the winner takes it all. A quarter of a century later, almost everyone in the West can still sing along to "Waterloo", the winning song from Agnetha, Anni-Frid, Benny and Bjorn. When gay clubs began replaying Abba's hits at the start of the Nineties - in suitably quasi-ironic fashion - they incited a best-selling cover version from the likes of Blancmange and Erasure. No? Well, unless you're willing to show yourself to be an anorak of quite frightening dimensions by admitting that it was Olivia Newton-John with "Long Live Love", you've got "nul points". Cast your mind back to 1974 Name the British entry in the Eurovision Song Contest. "It is the sky that sets me going," he once said.His daughter, by his first wife, is the artist Claire Dalby.Simon FenwickCharles Longbotham, artist, sailor, dioramist and architectural model- maker: born Carlton, Nottinghamshire 6 July 1917; married 1940 Eleanor Nairn-Allison (died 1972; one daughter), 1979 Jeanie Campbell-Taylor (nee Goodacre; two stepsons); died Cambridge 17 February 1999..

On board ship his favourite watch was at 4am, when he could see the sun rise, which he preferred to sunset, thinking the air was clearer. So in his character - a no-nonsense approach that was far-seeing, refreshing and frank."Longbotham's watercolours are, characteristically, atmospheric evocations of the sky and sea, or landscapes in which man is very incidental. In the psychology of his picture making, each time you see him view his subject from a certain distance so as to observe the whole and not just the parts. In 1965 he held a one-man show at the Federation of British Artists' Gallery in Pall Mall and in 1969 he was elected an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society, becoming a full member in 1974.Maurice Sheppard, a past president of the RWS, says: "At the RWS his views mattered at difficult moments. Although his only training was a brief time at Heatherley's Art School, in London, such was his natural skill that he exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Marine Artists He was elected to the Art Workers' Guild in 1963. Later he made models of the ship for Cunard's London and New York showrooms.He continued to paint, sometimes at midnight when he finished model- making, but it was not until he retired, to Norfolk, that he realised his desire to become a professional artist. The funnels proved particularly trying but after many wind-tunnel tests Longbotham came up with what was then a revolutionary design.

He spent a year on the work, travelling back and forth between London and Glasgow. In 1966 he received a telephone call inviting him to assist with the QE2. From 1946 until 1969 he worked as a professional model-maker and dioramist, despite undergoing two major spinal operations.At his studio in Ealing he made some 700 models. Projects included a model of Giles Gilbert Scott's scheme for rebuilding Coventry Cathedral, as well as work for the Festival of Britain, the Brussels World Fair '57, Addenbrooke's Hospital, the Commonwealth Institute and a palace for the Shah of Persia. Ill-health and pain were to dog him for the rest of his life.At the end of the war he worked briefly for a firm of model-makers, Bassett- Lowke, in Northampton before returning to London, where he was employed for a period by the Council of Industrial Design. "All the others were either killed or had nervous breakdowns." He was never without a sketchbook.

Minutes after an E-boat and air attack on the convoy off Sheringham he was making sketches, which some years later were worked up into a watercolour now in the Imperial War Museum.Finally, sick and exhausted by two years at sea, Longbotham was transferred to shore duties at Methil on the Firth of Forth. "Out of six navigators I was the last one to survive," he later wrote. He saw service as a navigating officer for anti-submarine trawlers, and he also escorted East Coast convoys to Portsmouth to show Hitler that the Channel would stay open. Despite the toughness of the regime, Longbotham looked back on these two years with affection. A model he made at this time was praised by John Masefield and is mentioned in his 1933 book The "Conway". After three years with the New Zealand Shipping Company and an abortive attempt to go into advertising, Longbotham was called up in 1940 to the RNR. More given to day-dreaming than to study - at Sunday service in Portsmouth Cathedral he would sit staring at the organ pipes and design ships in his head - he left Portsmouth Grammar School at 15 to train as a Merchant Navy officer on HMS Conway at Rock Ferry on the River Mersey. Born in 1917, the third son of a mining engineer, at Carlton in Nottinghamshire, Longbotham moved to Southsea at the age of eight and there he saw the ships which so captured his imagination.