Men dressed as women, women dressed as boys, anyone dressed as a cow, sweet tossing, happy endings and more double entendres than you can shake a Dick Whittington at; it’s panto season and, at Official London Theatre, that makes us as happy as prince who’s just found a foot to fit the glass shoe he’s been touting around town all day.
What’s better than one panto? Seven pantos… in 80 minutes. That’s what’s on offer in the Olivier Award nominated family favourite Potted Panto, which features CBBC’s Dan and Jeff speeding through Snow White, sprinting through Cinderella and storming through Sleeping Beauty in a chaotic trip into the world of Dames, giants and widows who are twanky.
We have history with the show’s stars. Earlier this year, when they were appearing in Potted Potter, we tested their knowledge of the world’s favourite schoolboy wizard with a fiendishly difficult quiz.
Having seen their competitive streaks in action before, pitting them against each other in a battle for pantomime supremacy seemed as obvious a choice as finding a giant beanstalk and deciding to climb it in search of riches.
So Who’s Behind You was born. Each competitor had 90 seconds in which to guess as many of the characters appearing over their shoulder as they could by asking just questions to be answered only with a yes or a no. Yes, a game that would have even Magnus Magnusson quaking at its trickiness, though you can guarantee he would not have found himself crouched down behind contestants wearing a cow hat and trying to stifle his laughter.
You can see what happened in the video above, or catch the actual show at the Vaudeville theatre this Christmas.