Creature From the Pit (2)

Pantomime is a uniquely British form of theatre. Unlike Morris dancing and the Mummers’ play, it’s a living, popular tradition, as opposed to one curated by revivalists. Plenty of theatres only remain in business because the annual “panto” season is a guaranteed money-spinner. The BBC reckons there were 260 professional pantomimes in Britain in 2025.

So what is a panto? If you are from outside the UK you may find it hard to understand what all the fuss is about. It’s an annual Christmas entertainment for children; based on fairy tales like Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk or folk tales like Robin Hood or Dick Whittington. The storyline plays second fiddle to song-and-dance numbers, pie-in-the-face slapstick routines and “Who’s on first?” skits. Each tale has its own cast of stock characters: almost anyone in England would know that Cinderella’s father is called Baron Hardup and Aladdin’s mother is named Widow Twanky. Cinderella has an entire subplot about Buttons and Dandini that was entirely unknown to the Grimm brothers. There is no fourth wall: all the characters are aware of the audience the whole time, which leads to much raucous audience participation:

“Have you seen the Sheriff, boys and girls? Well if you do be sure and….”

“HE’S BEHIND YOU!”

Oh: and it does weird but entirely innocent things with gender. At least one of the older female characters will be a “dame”--a man in women’s clothes--and the heroic male lead or “principal boy” will often be played by a young woman.

One particular characteristic of a good panto is that it shifts effortlessly between genres and registers. In that respect it’s not unlike Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed the later, MGM Marx Brothers movies. Although the show will be very broad farce, the protagonists—Cinderella or Aladdin or Prince Charming—will tend to deliver their lines relatively straight--playing romantic romantically and heroic scenes heroically. The giant might be a man on stilts; or a large pair of legs disappearing into the flies; or just the tallest actor the management was able to hire—but Jack will tend to dead-pan his reactions, even if his mother (“Dame Trott”) was making scatological innuendos about patting the cow in the previous scene.Even the smallest members of the audience aren’t remotely scared; but the scenes with the bad guys are played as if they were frightening. Babes in the Wood has largely vanished from the repertoire, because stories about child abduction are no longer thought to be very funny, even if everyone knows the kids are going to be saved by Robin Hood before the curtain call. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs can present difficulties in this regard: the trick is to create a narrative distance between the darkness of the fairy tale and the silliness of the performance. You might have an affable comedian saying “Boys and girls, I am the Huntsman, and my job is to kill Snow White! Do you think I will? Do you think I will?” Walt Disney played the heroine’s “death” for pathos, but the panto dwarfs often engage in comedic howling and bawling. I once saw one Warwick Davies essay the role of “Doc” and deliver an excellent speech beginning “Oh, if only this were a stage play, or perhaps even a classic movie, like, say, Return of the Jedi or Willow, which always have happy endings, but this is real life….”

Tolkien once saw a production of Puss In Boots that used smoke and lighting effects to transform a mouse into an ogre in front of the audience. He said that it was ingeniously done. But he added that if you could have convincingly effected the transformation, then either the audience would have been terrified; or they would have been baffled, as one sometimes is by a conjuring trick. They certainly wouldn’t have believed that they had seen actual magic. Fairy tales require secondary belief: special effects simply provide spectacle. This was one reason that he thought that a movie version of Lord of the Rings would be a terrible idea.

Now: very many Doctor Who fans, if asked what went wrong with Season Seventeen, would say that Graham Williams allowed the show to turn into a pantomime. And I think it is clear what the two formats have in common: the ignoring of the fourth wall; the highly stylised and theatrical acting; the villains who you boo and hiss but are not remotely frightened by; dark and serious stories presented as lighthearted comedy; and special effects where disbelief has to be “not so much suspended as hung, drawn and quartered.”

But surely, you can't blame Graham Williams and Douglas Adams for that? Doctor Who was like that from its very inception? 

Oh no, it wasn’t.

This is the latest of my ongoing commentary on the Tom Baker era of classic Who. If you have enjoyed it, it would absolutely make my day if you click on the link and pledge £5 a month to my Patreon. It's that easy. One little click. You know you want to.