PANTO BOSS: SEXIST JAPES ARE BEHIND US
SeASOnAl pantomimes will have a little less sauce this year because of the furore over inappropriate behaviour.
‘I think you do have to look harder at what you’re doing,’ said Michael Harrison, a producer and director of the london Palladium’s all-star Dick Whittington, featuring Julian Clary, elaine Paige, Charlie Stemp, emma Williams and Gary Wilmot.
Harrison’s also directing Cinderella, with Beverley Knight, at the Birmingham Hippodrome; and Peter Pan in newcastle, with Danny Adams.
He told me that following the allegations of serious sexual misconduct against prominent entertainment figures such as Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, and the debate about how some men have been able to get away with predatory behaviour, he and his colleagues began studying panto scripts and gags.
Uppermost on his mind, he said, as we observed rehearsals at the Palladium, was an old-fashioned routine, made famous by eric Morecambe and ernie Wise, called ‘The Wall’... in which a comic would put his head through a dummy wall and ‘turn and look up the skirt of the famous star’. Or a star actress would be pushed off a table, and her skirt would fly up.
‘I said nobody could do that,’ Harrison said. ‘That just feels wrong, with everything that’s going on,’ he added, noting that although those scenes were never in the Palladium show, they’ve been removed from a few of the 30-plus pantos produced by the Qdos group around the UK.
‘There’ll be no looking up skirts — and nobody’s going to be slapping anybody on the bottom. The times they are a changin’.’
After a moment’s reflection, he pointed out that in panto, if there’s anything suggestive and a female character is involved, it’s usually a dame — a man dressed as a woman — ‘so it doesn’t kind of have the same feel as if it actually was a lady’.
Of course, there will still be some sauciness and it was on full display at the Palladium. Clary, the king of innuendo, was having some fun with Whittington’s name: repeatedly referring to Charlie Stemp (playing the title character) as ‘Richard’.
‘You don’t like Dick any more?’ Stemp inquired innocently.
As choreographer Karen Bruce put the cast through a dance number, Harrison went through some of the jokes being used. ‘They’re saucy and politically incorrect... if you want political correctness, stay away!
‘But we are being sensitive to anything that might be deemed inappropriate when physicality is involved,’ Harrison said.