Andrew Lloyd Webber theatre. He also had originally set music to "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" at the age of 15. In 1965, Lloyd Webber was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and studied history for a term at Magdalen College, Oxford, although he abandoned the course in the winter of 1965 to study at the Royal College of Music and pursue his interest in musical theatre. In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was "The Likes of Us", a musical based on the
Andrew Lloyd Webber "The Phantom of the Opera" – to compete for the role. Viewers' telephone voting during the series raised more than £500,000 for the BBC's annual "Children in Need" charity appeal, according to host Graham Norton on air during the final. In 2007, Lloyd Webber's cat, Otto, leaped onto his Clavinova piano and "destroyed the entire score for the new 'Phantom' in one fell swoop." The Phantom in question was The Phantom of Manhattan, a planned sequel to Phantom of the Opera. On 1 July 2007, Lloyd Webber presented excerpts from his musicals as part of the Concert for Diana held