The panto's the thing

There is much to be glum about at this time of year, but one light I always look for in the autumn shadows is the revelation of which unlikely celebrities have been hired for panto season. Who has traded a pound of their flesh (which, if casting permits, they can disguise with a menacing hook) for the adulation of near-sighted pensioners and children totally jazzed on carbonated soft drinks and Jelly Babies?  Acts you may not have heard of in 15 or 20 years, who you assumed had perished in an inferno of political correctness and reality television, will rise phoenix-like to give their Baron Hard-Up in Woking or their Buttons in Wolverhampton.

In particular, I am fascinated by the US celebrities who have been lured over here to embrace our long-cherished festivities. In recent years, pantogoers have seen The Fonz as Captain Hook, Patrick Duffy as Baron Hardup, creepy little Mickey Rooney (Hardup again) and Paul Michael Glaser  (another Hook). Fonzie initially motorcycled in to replace Hasselhoff, who got a better offer. It would seem from this that Captain Hook is touted as the Hamlet of panto roles, with Baron Hardup the King Lear. This surely must be one of the ways in which the stars are sold the gig by 'their people'. Like, 'Hey! You're doing theatre! In England! They invented theatre! You'll be getting really raw with your craft.' And 'Panto's, like, a rilly, rilly old custom. Y'know, like Shakespeare!' Either that, or it's the mythologically enormous paypacket that panto purportedly dangles.

Little do our American cousins realise that come mid-January, they'll have contracted tonsilitis five times as it is passed back and forth, in and out of the dressing rooms. And as well as their costume, lovingly stitched from the finest manmade fibres, they'll be wearing a large coldsore every night, which has been fed and watered by the freezing English weather. After they've performed their cover of Rihanna's Umbrella, while dancing with Faye from Steps and a dozen children twirling umbrellas, and helped cook a slapstick wedding breakfast for the finale using a giant box of cereal with Credit Crunch written on it, they'll be spending every lonely night sleeping in a grubby Holiday Inn, making up complimentary sachets of Cadbury's Options with their own hot tears, dreaming of sunshine and good dentistry.

Anyway, my point is, this year the Churchill Theatre in Bromley have hired Hollywood In The 80s' own Steve Guttenburg. I saw a bit of Steve on Dancing With The Stars – the inferior US translation of Strictly Come Dancing. He is the most relentlessly positive person I have ever, ever seen in my life. He makes Tom Daly seem like Leonard Cohen. He really does feel grateful and blessed for every sorry opportunity that has ever come his way, and he has the permanently beaming expression of a child star, yet the slightly artificial hairline of a middle-aged Californian actor. I hope he brings the man from the Police Academy films who makes all the funny noises as the kids would love it, and he could probably use the regular work. Miss R has promised she will come and see this with me, as I long to see whether this Overgrown Pollyanna can keep smiling through his sub-standard accommodation and four weeks being upstaged by two paunchy stagehands wearing a giant cow's outfit,  but I suspect that the prohibitive price of theatre tickets In This Country will prevent us. (Dear Melvyn Bragg, I know not where else to turn, but I am concerned our children can longer afford to go to the theatre etc etc). Still, if the Churchill Theatre could also hire Ted Danson and Tom Selleck to appear with Steve as Three Men Playing Ugly Sisters, there is no ticket price too high.