Has it got legs?

A 200,000-word novel languishes in the bottom of a drawer and, quite possibly, that's the best place for it.

But recently I have had this itching desire to write a stage play.

I have no skill for doing this other than an overactive imagination and access to a computer.

So far, and subject to change, the storyline runs thus:

Set in New York's Bronx, it will concern the day-to-day existence of a bunch of homeless street hustlers in the early 1960s.

All of them are seasoned but lovable con men and each of the gang has his own special skill.

One is a smooth seducer of women, a gigolo, another a freewheeling hipster on the fringes of the jazz and drug scene.

One, despite his small stature, is an expert pool shark, while a fourth has learning difficulties and is helped out by the rest of the gang. And the final one, the gang's lieutenant, is gay and harbours feelings for its leader.

The leader is a charismatic dandy, a likeable loser with a seemingly never-ending supply of ever more hare-brained, get-rich-quick schemes.

Obviously, living on the fringes of society (their HQ is a backlot between tenement buildings) they frequently run into the law. In fact, the leader has a nemesis in the shape of a beleaguered and by-the-book NYPD flatfoot.

The stage set will be the fire escapes, washing lines, telephone poles, alleyways and garbage pails of a down-at-heel but highly romanticised New York (this is theatreland, after all).

Choreography will be by ex-Hot Gossip maestro and TV's Strictly Ballroom queen Arlene Phillips and the music and lyrics will be from that master of the downtrodden, Tom Waits, 25 years after he wrote the soundtrack to Copella's One From the Heart.

And the play itself will be a cross between Richard Price's The Wanderers, Lloyd-Webber's Cats, and Laurents, Bernstein and Sondheim's West Side Story.

Sound familiar?

Yes, I'm working on Top Cat: The Musical.

The opening sequence will eschew the familiar one of the cartoon show, where TC wanders down the street scamming various New York types (a workman down a manhole, a maitre d', a chauffeur) and will instead introduce the various characters through telling vignettes.

Choo-Choo hands over his Liza Minnelli record collection to the pawnbroker in order to buy TC a new hat.

Benny the Ball hustles his way through a $100 per stake tournament at Diego's Pool Hall. Spook supplies various Greenwich Village jazz types with marijuana (nothing stronger, Spook's a hustler but he has values).

Fancy is seen seducing a Manhattan socialite whose parents are vacationing upstate in the Catskills. Brain, who has difficulty reading, is seen stealing dog food from a liquor store (this vignette is loaded with irony because, although the characters are obviously cats, they are so humanised you wonder if they actually eat pet food, be it dogs' or cats').

Officer Dibble, the cop, is seen kissing his wife – whom he believes is having an affair with their landlord – goodbye before going on the beat.

ll this activity is threaded by the Waits-penned opening track, Just Another Morning in Goddamn, with each of the cast taking a verse while acting out their character-introducing vignette.

Indeed the refrain, 'It's all a dream, it's all a sham, it's just another morning in Goddamn', runs throughout the play as an evocative and touching motif.

Top Cat is first glimpsed in familiar guise, rising from his trash can yawning, with earplugs and facemask. He reaches into the police phone box attached to the telephone pole and checks the time on an old, battered alarm clock.

He too then sings his verse of Goddamn ('I is what I is, I am what I am, alive and well and in Goddamn') and then sets about summoning his gang in the old way – bashing two dustbin lids together.

Torn from their pursuits, the gang gathers down Hoagie's Alley and launches into a rousing Mariachi-style song, We May Be Poor But We Do See Life, accompanied by a small group of street mice wearing sombreros and playing assorted Mexican instruments.

The various storylines of the play are then explained.

The mayor is clamping down on hustlers/stray cats, which means more police patrols down the alley (well, a strolling Dibble), a new gang of dogs has moved into the neighbourhood and to top it all, Top Cat's long-lost brother, the decidedly-seedy Hep Cat, is coming to visit him from Detroit.

Many touching scenes and fabulous dance routines ensue.

There's a claw fight between TC and the leader of the dogs, Al Sation (TC wins, but only just).

Let down gently by TC, Choo-Choo finds love with the firehouse cat, Malcolm Powder, and Fancy is the best man in a frenetic civil ceremony at Diego's Pool Hall.

Brain gets to college, Spook stops dealing weed and falls for a beatnik chick called Mo, TC proves to Dibble that his wife isn't having an affair with their landlord (she's teaching him how to dance so that he can have a last waltz with his terminally ill wife) and Top Cat and his brother, Hep Cat, make up.

Tom Waits's excellent score contains many a classic, including Death, the Working Man's Friend Ballad of the Bouffant Wino, Cat Gut Your Tongue and Bob Martin's a Friend of Mine.

So what do you think? Has it got legs? Will it open on Broadway to rapturous reviews with Jack Black as Top Cat and John Goodman as Dibble? Will Steve Buscemi play Hep Cat and will Tom Waits win an Ivor Novello Award for the score?

Who knows? If not, there are still my other ideas.

What about the mockumentry, Droopy: The Vietnam Years? Fred and Wilma and Gomez and Morticia in Celebrity Cartoon Wife Swap?

Or Snow White and her seven companions in the Big Brother-style reality show, I'm Vertically Challenged, Get Me Out of Here?

Worse things have happened. Anyone remember the Mr Blobby theme park, World of Crinkley Bottom, at Morecambe?

Sheesh.