Friday 9 December 2005

Sniffy Advent: Day, the ninth

I have literally hundreds of bloggers telling me how good I am each day; that I am the best at this blogging business. And do you know what? I actually agree with them, I AM the best blogger on the planet.

"Oh no you're not!"

"Oh yes I am!"

"Oh no you're NOT!"

"Oh yes I fucking am!!"

"Oh no you're fucking NOT!!!"

"Oh yes I double fucking bastard AM!!!"

No, I'm not, it was like a bit of a joke to open the door to today's item in the Sniffy Advent:


The Pantomime

For those outside the UK, here's an introduction to what panto is all about from a website.

"Pantomime is a curious entertainment - a form of ritual theatre staged around the winter solstice. Originally silent (a form of mime), it is now anything but, with extensive vocalisation from both the performers and the audience.

The stories are generally well-known (drawn from popular folk-tales and similar sources), populated with stock characters, including a principal boy, generally played by a young lady with shapely legs, the heroine, also played by a young lady (which gives an added edge to the inevitable romance) and a dame, played by a man as an exaggeration of a lewd middle-aged lady. Scripts change from year to year, but generally contain four strands of humour: visual, topical, corny and downright rude. In the UK this is considered to be family entertainment."

We used to get dragged to pantos when we were kids and, as kids, you knew they were fucking dreadful even at that tender age. Imagine how awful it must be for accompanying adults to act interested with participatory shouts of "It's behind you!" when required.

The thing about panto that gets me is the amount of cross-dressing that goes on. As described above, you get a heroine, played by a pretty actress and a young hero boy, also played by a pretty actress. I always fancied the the principal "boy", simply because I thought I was supposed to. In the closing moments, hero and heroine get it together for some, well, errrm.... girl on girl action.

Explains a lot I suppose.

Having not been to a panto for years, I can't really get stuck into them here. However, they do seem to attract the dregs of British C and D-list celebs who, desperate for any exposure, crawl out of the woodwork to appear in panto in Reading, Swansea or Huddersfield. This year, Manchester is blessed with people I've never heard of in Cinderella at the Opera House and Peter Pan at the Palace. I won't be going.

Of course, one panto that I did enjoy (twice), was this:

LoG Flyer

All the characters from my favourite TV comedy show, the League of Gentlemen, in their own Panto, which I think is very loosely based on Jack and the Beanstalk.

"Oh no it isn't!"

"Oh yes it is"

"Oh n..."

"Just fuck off!"

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