Here’s One He Made Earlier

Former Blue Peter presenter and Chief Scout Peter Duncan is now creating pantomimes in his own house and garden. Susan Elkin met him on set.

So what does an active, creative, sporty man do during lockdown when theatres and just about everything else he cares about are closed? Peter Duncan, 67, created a literally home-spun digital Jack and the Beanstalk for Christmas 2020.

And it was so successful that he’s done it again with Cinderella for this year. Peter plays the dame (or one of them in Cinderella) and co-directs.

He was looking at rushes when I arrived. Summoned by his wife Annie, he then made me a lovely pot of tea over which we sat in his kitchen to chat.

Peter and Annie have lived in this homely 1860 Wimbledon house for 35 years and brought up four children there. “Please excuse the state of the house” says Annie cheerfully waving at paint daubs on the wall in a room near the front door “We used it as a set!”. Later when he’s showing me the garden – several “rooms”, lots of grass, hedges and sheds – Peter points ruefully at the large pile of filming equipment near the garden door and explains that he hasn’t quite got round to sorting it out.

“When we first bought this house, my mother lived in the basement” explains Peter. “Then she fell down the stairs and died in

1999, a dreadful shock – after which we took it all over.” It’s certainly full of character, as are its owners.

So how did Peter get into the entertainment industry? “I grew up with it, really” he says. “My parents were entertainers – variety artists and producers. My father did puppet shows on beaches too and my mother worked with ENSA during the war.

I was an actor from age 15”.

Peter, who hated the rigidity of his “bells and whistles” secondary school, got out of education as soon as he could and didn’t train formally as an actor although he worked extensively for the next ten years before falling into the famous 1980s Blue Peter stint. “Men of a certain age still think I’m a superhero” he chuckles, sitting opposite me with his curly white hair swept back in what he calls his “pandemic pony tail”. He tells me he is reluctant to get rid of it and I say: “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” After Blue Peter he went back to being an actor, with a lot of pantomime over the

years. Over five decades he has been part of the National Theatre ensemble, played Wilbur in Hairspray, Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl, been Macduff, Jack Firebrace in the national tour of Birdsong and much more. All that experience is bundled into his own pantos.

“When we made Jack and the Beanstalk we really didn’t know what we were going to do with it except to stream it to groups. I knew Scouts and Guides would be interested and probably schools who could watch in their bubbles and we’d make it very cheap. But then something unexpected happened. My sister teaches pilates and one of her clients is a chap who runs Everyman cinemas. I went to see him and it all tumbled from there. Our film went out in Everyman cinemas where, incredibly, it held its own against CGI Hollywood Blockbusters.”

Peter went to see it “anonymously” at an Everyman at Crystal Palace so he could watch audience reaction. “The trick lies in making it as interactive as it would be live” he says “And that’s all in the timing. Shout outs are missing, obviously, so we did Zooms with the schools afterwards to replicate the theatre experience and we’ll do that again this time.” Although Peter tells me several times that he doesn’t set much store by reviews he was clearly pleased to get lots of “great” ones for Jack and the Beanstalk and delighted that the work got a “fantastic” result from schools and teachers.

The new panto, Cinderella, has a larger cast and consciously tries, in an unassuming but entertaining way, to accommodate aspects of the Key

Stage 1 and 2 curriculum in the six accompanying videos. “We cover science, music, story telling and so on” he says. “I do the science which includes a practical challenge about how you make a pumpkin spin and float”. The emphasis, as in nearly everything Peter talks about, is on practical creativity. And the panto itself was made almost entirely in and around the Duncan home. A garden shed became a bathroom which is germane to the plot. The tiny but very leafy driveway to the front door allowed Cinderella’s coach, drawn by real white ponies, to go to the ball convincingly. Since they finished filming Peter and his colleagues (including Ian Talbot who used to run Open Air Theatre, Regents Park where Peter played the title role in Fantastic Mr Fox) have been busy synching, overlaying sound and pulling the whole thing together.

His five years as Chief Scout, a voluntary post now held by Bear Grylls, taught Peter a lot about children and what a lot they can do – and need to do – outside the school curriculum. “Did you know that Baden-Powell’s original idea was simply to take children away from towns and give them the experience of rural outdoors?” he asks me. “That’s really all it was but it caught on rapidly.”

I ask Peter about his own children: Lucy (32), Katy (30),

Georgia (28) and Arthur (26). Are they in entertainment? “We didn’t give them much choice” he laughs.

“After my mother’s death, when they were 12, 10, 8 and 6, we decided to take the children out of school for six months and go travelling. The idea was lots of trains and big cities – from Paris to Berlin, Egypt, Zimbabwe,

Nepal, plus New Zealand and South

America among other places. We took a teacher with us so that they didn’t get too behind with schoolwork.”

Peter and Annie wanted to record the experience creatively from, the point of view of the children so they were constantly filming. “In those days it was all on cassettes so there was all the worry of not losing them – we spread them through the children’s luggage. It was all very costly of course. But when we got home, I put the footage together and the dear old BBC took it. It aired as Travel Bug and spawned a genre because no one had previously done it from a child perspective.”

In the end the Duncan family actually made three series. The second series focused on China and the third on India. “We were recognised at the airport and upgraded to First Class!” recalls

Peter telling me that although the West “loves to demonise China” he was really attracted to Chinese culture and his fourchild family was, of course a huge novelty in one-child China. He also tells me that by then his eldest daughter was 14 and, as a Western teenager growing up, hated the trip. He then laughs and informs me that a few years later she studied anthropology at university and learned Mandarin, so the travel experience clearly rubbed off on her despite what she felt at the time.

“I grew up with it, really… I was an actor from age 15”

Today Lucy is a singer (she has written some songs for Cinderella) like her younger sister Georgia.

The middle sister, Katy is a playwright and community theatre practitioner. Arthur, the youngest, is a chef. He came home for lockdown and taught his mother how to make sour dough. Annie proudly shows me the very appetising looking results which she and Peter plan to eat for lunch later.

So what about the future of the arts? “The funding needs recalibrating because it tends to go to the wrong people. When institutions exist for their own sake it’s hopeless”. Meanwhile, Peter affirms, creativity in education is vital and the arts are crucial to that. Few readers of Ink Pellet would disagree.

As I pack away my notebook and pen

Peter tells me that he’s running the London Marathon this year for a charity called The Clothing Collective which gives vouchers to homeless people to spend in charity shops. He has done the marathon several times before. “About once in ten years” he quips showing me the times for his past efforts. “If I can come in at 5 hours 30 mins this time I shall be delighted although, because of Cinderella, I haven’t had time to train properly.”

Book Cinderella through www.pantoonline.co.uk

Family ticket (including online activity pack) £25

Groups fewer than 25 people £100

Groups 26-50 people £125

Groups 52-75 people £150

Concessions available for schools, Scouts, Guides, care homes, unemployed and key workers.

“The trick lies in making it as interactive as it would be live”