If you’ve seen any of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge character you’ll have some idea of the kind of faux-famous persons usually starring in such shows. if one had harboured hopes of being on television forever, doing panto might seem something of a career graveyard - but it’s a surprisingly well-paid one. Tellingly, on one show Partridge mentions sotto voce that “the money is very good.”
Nowadays generally you’re talking about people who were, perhaps briefly, famous. People from reality TV shows can show up. So can ex-members of Boy and Girl bands. Sportsmen and soap stars, as we’ve seen, are also common, although perhaps the soap stars are those whose normal working life most closely resembles the sheer hard work of a panto season. There can be two or even three shows a day, and the show can run all week, for up to, what, two months.
The pantomime is very well-loved in Britain and consequently it’s regularly reimagined, sometimes being turned all posh like McKellen’s version, sometimes going much more into the themes of the fairytale - say in particularly arty theatres - sometimes making actual proper artistic statements, etc. When I were a lad, on the other hand, it was the last resting place of the variety act. The dancers would come on, we’d be introduced to the principal boy, the first scene would play out, and then in between scenes some act like the Acromaniacs or some puppeteers or something would be cobbled into the plot for no reason at all. Sometimes they’d have the acts wear costumes (ie. we’d be expected to imagine they were street traders or something from the background of the scene we’d just watched), but more often than not it was just a variety act wandering on between scenes without any explanation.
Many comedians, particularly of the older school, either made their name in pantomime or became regular anchors in their later years. Les Dawson was a famously brilliant Dame, one of the best apparently. Joe Pasquale, who won I’m A Celebrity, is doing one this year too - but he probably does one every year. The point about comedians is that it’s the really hard workers who’ll do pantos, the ones who worked their way up through working men’s clubs - as it happens, these also tend to be the less PC comics, more the sort who know thousands of mother-in-law jokes. Smart young political ad-libbers from London’s comedy club circuit don’t show up frequently and one might wonder if it’s the workload that puts them off. Not many “modern” comics have quite the “loveable” persona that would go down well in a panto. But again, you can’t ever stereotype because the panto isn’t an old idea which is regularly revived, it’s an old idea which is uniquely, even frighteningly successful, and seems to grow more successful with every passing year - this year Lily Savage is playing the Wicked Queen in a rival production to that one with McKellen in it. While she’s a traditional act, I’d always thought of Lily Savage as a far more modern figure than would fit into panto, but fit she apparently does. There are definite regional variations in pantos, too. LOCAL stars will be the real pullers - again, it’s about being well-loved. You could hardly find an Englishman among Glasgow’s pantos this December.
The thing is, everybody knows it’s a bloke in a frock (being British we find this the funniest thing in the world), and as the audience will be at least half full of adults, there’ll be at least a little innuendo. Sometimes a great deal. (There are far ruder “adult” pantomimes too but they’re not really the real deal - neither are the one-off celebrity pantomimes you see on television). At the end of virtually every panto I’ve ever been to, there’s a big song where they bring out a board with the words written on it, divide up the audience and get them to sing in competition. There’s usually a few bits where they throw sweets into the audience too.
