BagehotIt’s behind you!

AS BAGEHOT and his six-year-old son took their seats for “Cinderella” at the New Wimbledon Theatre, both were anxious. Your columnist had gone two decades without attending one of Britain’s traditional Yuletide romps. The prospect of now spending two hours watching Linda Gray—Sue Ellen Ewing in “Dallas”, as was—making her panto debut as the Fairy Godmother was discomfiting. His son was worried about the Ugly Sisters, gigantic creatures with space hopper breasts and dresses made out of pizza topping, according to the publicity pictures. They looked scary.

Both fears were allayed (albeit with some hiding under the seat). The show, whose producer, First Family Entertainment (FFE), has brought big budgets, West End standards and faded Hollywood stars to the Christmas panto in recent years, was fast and polished. The dancing and singing—of pop hits and old show tunes—was superb. So were the cheesy gags, which were relentless. “Got these on the frontier!” swaggered Baron Hardup, pointing to a row of medals on his chest—“And I got these ones on the back ’ere!” he added, spinning around to reveal another gleaming row. Your columnist, to his son’s astonishment, guffawed.

This illustrated pantomime’s most appealing quality: a capacity to amuse all the family, often with lewd gags, designed to titillate oldies and befuddle their offspring. (“I need some buttocks on my face!” says one Ugly Sister. “Botox, you mean?” says the other. “I know what I said!” the first replies.) More broadly, the Wimbledon production, which will play to full houses throughout its five-week run, showed how absurd are recent predictions of the panto’s demise. These are also long-standing. “Pantomime is no longer what it used to be,” huffed the Times in 1846. Its health has in fact never looked ruder, with 273 pantomimes now playing across Britain, the biggest of which—such as Wimbledon’s—will take up to £2m (£3.1m). Without their annual panto cash, many of the theatres staging pantos this Christmas could not survive.

Without wishing to spoil the magic, your columnist pondered what it was. Unusually among Britain’s inventions in popular culture—including most of the world’s sports and half its television formats—pantomime has not travelled well. There are scattered pantos playing elsewhere in the English-speaking world this Christmas—including an annual spectacular in Johannesburg and a dozen productions in America—but nowhere outside Britain has the medium really caught on. It is peculiarly British.

As with much of the national culture, the explanation for that starts with the Victorians. They turned the pantomime, hitherto a sort of Anglicised Commedia dell’Arte, melding Italianate Harlequinades and English fairy tales, into the family-based, festive institution it is today. In the process they imbued it with their most self-regarding qualities—the playfulness and dutifulness of the panto hero, the fairness that is his reward—and their mores. These principally concerned sex, and are still apparent in the grotesque, undersexed and much-abused figure of the pantomime dame (or dames in “Cinderella”), who is always played by a man and is the main determinant of a production’s success. For the Victorians, the dame represented a rare opportunity to manhandle a lady on stage, for comic and licentious effect. In more relaxed modern times, she is often performed with great campery or lewdness—but without quite dispelling an impression that Britons are so awkward about sex they need to make a joke of it. Buttoned-up Americans and more laissez-faire Europeans alike find that odd.

At once familial and national, the panto also appeals to the regional identities that have proved strikingly enduring on a small, but crowded, island. Even in metropolitan London, many panto gags rely on local knowledge. “Steal it? You’re not in Tooting now, love!” exclaimed one of the Uglies in New Wimbledon. Outside the capital, this tendency is even more pronounced with, for example, Liverpudlian audiences only keen to watch Scouse actors—except for those playing the baddies, who are often posh southerners. In Glasgow, any English actor “would get booed off the stage,” says Kevin Wood, FFE’s boss. Baddies there must have Edinburgh accents—and the biggest laugh of the night is when they are told to “Sod off back to Edinburgh!”

A third big reason for the panto’s enduring claim on Britons’ affections encompasses all the others: the mixed economy that has always governed British theatre and fuelled its genius. Even in more rarefied theatrical forms this is evident: Shakespeare existed on ticket receipts as well as courtly patronage, so had to make his plays popular. Similarly, panto has benefited from government support for theatres, yet its innovations have been driven by commerce, from the casting of music-hall stars in the late 19th century, to that of Hollywood celebrities today. This has helped ensure pantomime remains, despite its self-conscious whiff of nostalgia, relevant. It has also helped keep up its quality: as another sign of a recent resurgence, Britain’s best actors are increasingly willing to appear in pantos—led by Sir Ian McKellen, who appeared as Widow Twankey, the dame in “Aladdin”, in 2004.

Ya boo you lovely Yanks!

The Hollywood stars Mr Wood has recruited—who are essentially “famous and not very busy”, he says—have enjoyed mixed success. Pamela Anderson, appearing as the genie in “Aladdin”, caused logjams on Wimbledon Broadway; David Hasselhoff, after making his panto debut in Wimbledon as Captain Hook, is now playing to a smaller audience in Southend. Ms Gray, it must be said, is not a panto natural either. She looked almost supernaturally youthful, at 74, in a tiara and sequinned dress; her delivery of rhyming couplets was less compelling. Yet she gamely spouted a stream of “Dallas”-themed gags: “Don’t worry! I know what I’m doing, I went through it all when I was a Ewing!” And the audience members Bagehot consulted thought that would just about do. To be snooty about Americans, while slavishly admiring them: this is another crucial characteristic of being British.