Innuendo is all part of panto fun
YOU can always trust Christopher Biggins when it comes to panto. Nobody does it better and nobody’s done it for longer. Biggins is a veteran dame and when he says pantos are drowning in a sea of politically-correct “appropriateness” that’s crushing the life out of the traditional, saucy innuendo we love, he’s right.
Harvey Weinstein has much to answer for: his revolting sexual advances to unwilling young actresses have been somehow taken as carte blanche for every woman once made to feel “uncomfortable” by a leer or a clumsy pass to join the #metoo campaign. As a result companies as huge as NBC TV in the US have imposed new rules on staff, banning them from having romantic relations with each other, even when consensual.
Workers at NBC have been ordered to spy on each other and snitch to HR. But if they do the honourable thing and refuse to betray friends they face the sack.
Then there are the new anxieties about office Christmas parties, tipsy flirting, or snatching kisses under the mistletoe. It’s as if we’ve turned into re-born Oliver Cromwells.
I met my husband at work. We’d both have been out of a job if the NBC rules applied back in the 1980s. Actually, lots of marriages start with an office romance. If all firms were as draconian as NBC now is, the human race would die out.
But back to panto. Biggins says he can’t DAME: Christopher Biggins in panto wait to retire from damehood because it’s just no fun any more. A major panto production company has cut a scene from this year’s Dick Whittington. No, it’s not the one where someone says, “Nearly midnight and still no sign of Dick,” the much-loved innuendo which still causes eruptions of mirth even though it’s one of the oldest jokes around.
“Innuendo,” says Biggins, “is fantastic and is wonderful and is joyous – for parents and children.”
Instead producers have cut a scene in which a male character looks up a woman’s skirt. “This year,” they say, “it just feels wrong.”
No. They’re wrong. In panto men dress as women and women dress as boys. It’s great, it’s silly, it’s quintessentially British and about as sexually threatening as Cinderella’s pumpkin turning into a coach.
We used to take our kids to panto every year. Once, at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, I was mortified when the star Ken Dodd produced an enormous pair of pink silk knickers and, knowing I was in the audience, looked straight at me and asked if I wanted them back. Offended? Moi? Not a bit. Embarrassed, yes. But my children laughed like drains.
Next year I want to re-start our family Christmas panto tradition again, with the grandchildren. I have no doubt they’ll have a wonderful time. And so will we grown-ups, as long as they haven’t cut out the innuendo and sauce.
If they do I’ll have to sadly tell the kiddies that from now on, panto is behind you. THE US investigator who recently quit the real-life X-Files unit says he’s seen enough to say with confidence: “We are not alone.” Luis Elizondo has spoken of multiple radar readings, gun camera footage from military aircraft and countless eye witness statements.
“If this was a court of law we are at beyond reasonable doubt,” he stated, quoting “very distinct observations of objects moving at hypersonic speeds without a sonic boom and displaying extreme manoeuvrability at speeds of 7-8,000mph.”
Not your interstellar equivalent of the M25, then.