"It's Behind You"
Panto is a very British thing, the only art form (and yes, it is an art form!) that we Brits ever invented.
(There are those who dispute this, pointing to its roots in Commedia dell’Arte, but that’s over-simplistic. Panto is a fusion of the Commedia, filtered through the French Italian Night Scenes and fused with medieval English traditions such as Morality Plays and Morris Dancing.) (So there!)
The BTG had (still has) readers from all over the world so it seemed right to me that, every year when it got towards Christmas, I should write an article on panto to help fans of British theatre elsewhere in the world understand what this strange British Christmas tradition is all about.
In early 2002 (or it may have been late 2001), New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd were looking to produce a coffee table type of book on panto and they searched the internet looking for a potential author, and came across the articles I’d written. They e-mailed me and asked if I’d be interested in writing said book.
Now this was not something I had ever considered. I didn’t think of myself as a panto expert, although I had spent more than ten years photographing them at Sunderland Empire, Newcastle Theatre Royal and a number of amateur groups, but the idea did interest me. The advance they were offering was quite tasty too, especially since I was due to retire in 2003 and had no idea how my financial situation would pan out, so I accepted.
I spent more than a year researching and found it fascinating, particularly tracing the origins, finding correspondences between the Roman comic playwright Plautus (died 184BC) and the Commedia (16th century) and tracing that connection through the centuries.
But every period of panto’s development proved equally fascinating and I really loved doing it. I amassed a great deal of (to me, at any rate) exciting material and then reached the stage of having actually to write the book! Not, I felt, an easy task!
Why not? Because it could so easily have become an academic treatise, which would have been a disaster, for this was to be a book for the general reader, a book that would entertain as well as inform. It needed to be rigorous but light-hearted, informative but entertaining. It was almost six months in the writing but we got there and It’s Behind You: The Story of Pantomime was published in November 2004.
In December, the Ugly Sisters in the Newcastle Theatre Royal production of Cinderella, Nigel Ellacott and Peter Robbins, who were the “cover girls” of the book, actually did a book-signing session at the theatre. I didn’t do any signing because Nigel and Peter were the big draw, but it sold copies so I had nothing to complain about!
Incidentally, I gave a copy to my former Music Department colleague at King George School and she took it in to show the kids.
“Nah,” said one lad. “It’s not him.”
“It is,” Freda insisted.
“Canna be,” the lad replied. “He’s just a teacher.”
Ho-hum!