- Title
- Look out behind you?
- Creator
- Kelly, Veronica
- Relation
- Popular Entertainment Studies Vol. 2, Issue 1, p. 112-116
- Publisher
- University of Newcastle
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Pantomime seems distinctive – possibly unique –in its eerie ability to graft its memories and their secondary re‐workings onto individual mappings of the human lifespan. For its fans, their pleasurable pantomime memories colour their unique pasts and childhoods, their communal and local identifications, structuring their internal epochal clocks. To discuss panto is to elide history and mortality, past and present, Christmas Past and Christmas Yet to Come. It is expected to provide security against time’s mutability, hence the centuries‐old lament that panto today is not as good as it used to be. But unlike the mediated texts of film or television, which also carry pleasurable freights of individual historical memories, panto was and remains an evolving and syncretic live performance practice operating comfortably in the context of global entertainment industries. In the snowbound British winter of 2010, the satirical dandy duo, the West End Whingers, set forth to sample their favourite holiday fare. A Qdos production of Dick Whittington at the Birmingham Hippodrome with the 77‐year‐old camp soap icon Joan Collins plus Nigel Havers and Julian Clary (‘There’s eight inches outside!’) satisfied their fandom dreams. Yet it earned their qualified critical approval due to ‘the absence of a slosh scene, a principal boy, a song‐sheet (although there was a singalong) and sweet throwing’.1 Correspondents of the blog are quick to defend the show (‘I took a pensioner, a pre‐teen and an old queen. We all had a wonderful time’, protests ‘mattyd’ [sic]). Others joined in the lament for lost excellences or defended the integrity of their own local pantos. Sweets are indeed being lobbed into the gallery in fine traditional style via tennis racquet, reports Ian Shuttleworth of the Christmas shows in Hammersmith and Hackney, so the Whingers should just get out more.2
- Subject
- pantomime; entertainment; afterpieces; Popular Entertainment Studies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1472272
- Identifier
- uon:48800
- Identifier
- ISSN:1837-9303
- Rights
- © 2011 The Author.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Popular Entertainment Studies
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