Tonight:
9°c
How do you like your panto? The posh-non posh divide is never greater than in the season of principal boys and pneumatic dames. Last year, I took my brood to the Old Vic, where Cinderella came full of Stephen Fry metrosexual jokes and Sandi Toksvig chortled in the narrator's chair.
Brilliantly written and absolutely riveting if you were at least three decades old and aware of all the in jokes. This year, the Old Vic, inexplicably, has dropped its posh panto (Are times really that tough? All together now: "Oh yes, they are ")
So it was meat-and-veg variety for us. Really, this came as a secret relief. I like the local jokes and the fact that you don't need a knowing production with jokes about fiscal stimulus: just a top class Dame and a decent script and an audience that isn't remotely self-conscious about ending up in the limelight, as I told myself when one of Snow White's dwarves tried to mount my knee on Sunday.
I know one critic who has her run of all pantos across the land but swears by the Hornchurch theatre. Also prone to favouritism, I have adopted the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury as my home match. It has one of the best Dames on the circuit in Dave Lee, who has kept a gag about chasing ghosts around a scruffy old bench going for 12 years, so that the audience starts laughing as soon as the bench appears. It has its wicked way with the social pecking order of the Medway towns, too: "What shall we do with the Wicked Queen? Send her to do panto in Chatham!" The hapless henchman, naturally, spoke fluent Estuary, innit.
The only mystery is why Londoners don't flock a bit further afield: so have a look on www.bigpantoguide.co.uk. Canterbury is only an hour and a quarter on the train, tickets from way under £20 - and quite a reasonable little cathedral thrown in.
