How Gay is our Panto?
It’s that time of year again, suddenly, isn’t it? (Oh no it isn’t)…When every first question is what are you doing for Christmas and every second one is who are you doing it with? (Oh yes it is…)
I see in today’s Daily Telegraph — always a reliable source of hilarious articles — that “gay panto comes out” and that the genre has been enhanced beyond previous generations of presumably “straight panto” by the participation of Mark Ravenhill, Jonathan Harvey, Ian McKellen and Stephen Fry.
Oh yes it hasn’t, and my name’s Christopher Biggins; hurrah for Biggins, incidentally, deservedly crowned Queen of the Jungle on the “I’m a Celebrity” television programme.
Biggins, a practised panto dame, must be dying to get his hands on one of these new gay-friendly pantomime scripts. He’s been bottling himself up for decades now in hetero-happy-time rubbish. As Danny La Rue used to say as he descended the staircase as dame in a swimming costume: “I know what you’re thinking ladies: I wonder where he puts it?”
And what about Julian Clary, the best Dandini ever, and the only one ever to top the bill in Cinderella, who has been sharing his lunch box with the kiddies at panto matiness for years now?
Clary’s particularly interesting because he looks so flipping ambisexually gorgeous in the role. Most women I know who’ve seen him as Dandini fancy him rotten. How gay is that?
The great thing about proper pantomime, of course, is that it confuses gender demarcation lines without kowtowing to gay sensibility beyond the joy of a raggedy chorus line on the village green, and that’s just camp.
The idea that there’s a new mood of ownership by gays of pantomime is as risible as the idea that widows have bragging rights on Women of Troy or hairdressers on Hairspray. Lots of gay people loathe pantomime.
For most of us, whatever our sexual proclivities, pantomime reinvents the innocence of theatre itself, the audience contact, the colour, the medieval morality sense of good and evil. It is a time of silliness and pratfalls, big costumes and bad jokes, end of year blow-out. And it’s for children, that is the children in all of us.
I think of the great dames I have seen: Joe Black, Stanley Baxter, Danny, Biggins, Les Dawson, John Inman, at this time of year. And of the great Buttons’s: Brian Conley, Des O’Connor, Bobby Davro.
And I think: none of them (apart from Biggins, Danny and John Inman, as far as I know) were exclusively gay or even exclusively interested in pantomime as a gay art form. They were/are all great entertainers with something special: a big mega-watt, audience-embracing personality. They weren’t even proper actors.
And here we get to it. Ian McKellen gave a great performance as a dame, but he wasn’t a great dame. Roger Lloyd Pack, a marvellous actor, at the Barbican last year gave a fairly good performance as the dame, but he wasn’t a success in the role.
The most patronising comment in the Telegraph drivel is that of one of the Barbican actors, someone called Mel Giedroyc (you tell me), who says that Jonathan Harvey is reinventing the art form and that pantomime is becoming cool as a result.
Who wants pantomime to be cool, for God’s sake? I will be happy to be proved wrong at the Barbican and Old Vic this week, but cool is for pseuds, snobs, certain theatre critics and gay militants. Real people like panto as it always has been — cheap, cheerful and chock full of low laughter, with irresistible personalities singing lots of bad pop songs.
Oh yes they do, and oh yes they will.
