I love pantomime. Without exception, the best part of being on T.V. is that you get to do pantomime. Critics knock it and mock it, and nobody's pretending that it's high art, but approached in the right spirit, panto is just pure fun.

All my life I've been a performer. A dozen or so of us Stourbridge schoolfriends under the direction of the brilliant Mike Barry (himself only seventeen) formed an AmDram group called Stourbridge Youth Theatre. We did three productions a year, including a panto. The Youth Theatre, along with playing guitar, running cross-country and watching the Albion, pretty much defined my 'teens. And many, in fact the majority of the SYT founders later found professional work as musicians, actors, directors, writers, stage managers...  A great little company.

So being invited to do pro panto was, for me, a dream gig. Consider this: ninety-odd per cent of actors, dancers and so forth are out of work at any one time. Come each Christmas, they finally get to do what they like best in the company of like-minded colleagues. They are talented, young, great looking, temporarily well off and all have personalities the size of the Albert Hall. They rehearse hard, but once the show starts they're usually only working three or four hours a day, and it's a gas anyway. The rest of the time…. yo, party. And this goes on for months.

I did three Xmas shows: Wizard in Plymouth and Newcastle (see also the 'picture frame' photo): Dick Whittington at the Cambridge Arts Theatre with Adrian Mills from "That's Life!" and, amongst others, Anthea Askey and Will Fyffe Jr, whose tales of their legendary fathers I could have listened to all night. (I later got to employ Will as M.D. on a Tom O'Connor album which I produced): my last panto was Babes in the Wood at His Majesty's Theatre in Aberdeen.