Oh, yes it is!

When do you do it? Early December, get it out of the way, kickstart the season? Christmas Eve, a ritual distraction from last-minute madness? Maybe the weird, dateless days between Christmas and New Year, a brave bid to insert some structure into that invertebrate week?

It’s panto season, of course. Which means you can all chant ‘Oh, no it isn’t!’ back at me and we can indulge in some knowing call-and-response. We’ve all seen one panto too many by now, hissed and booed, sung along and groaned, before the magic wand makes everyone merry again. With only a handful of stories that really work, and a contractual requirement to shoehorn a memetastic 6-7 gag into every production this year, it’s easy to feel a touch of festive fatigue on the way to the theatre.

But, in spite of my inner Grinch, I love a bit of panto. It’s the great theatrical leveller, seasoned with a huge dose of nostalgia.

I still remember my first. Sunderland Empire. Cinderella. When we collected our tickets, we were given confectionary-pink stickers reading ‘I love you, Cinders!’ I wore it with pride.

On stage, a delirious mix of magic and terror. What if the Ugly Sisters really did poison the ice cream at the interval? Can a pumpkin really turn into a carriage? Somehow, despite having neither rats nor horses, a threadbare stage effect budget in a provincial theatre had me absolutely sold. I saw it before my very eyes, and to six-year-old me it was real.

The singalong mattered. Our side of the theatre had to be the loudest. I don’t know if I’d ever wanted anything quite so earnestly as a handful of sweeties tossed from the stage to come flying my way. With an attention span that had previously maxed out about halfway through Top of the Pops, suddenly I was sitting, entranced, for a couple of hours.

Later, I played in stage bands for am dram shows. Tinsel around my clarinet (not a euphemism, although it might have fit with some of the gags in the script). Flashing bowties and a borrowed tux. Nerd-chic.

Then I put away childish things. Theatre became drama, high art. The intersection of philosophy and emotion (OK, and Mamma Mia! because musicals play by their own rules). I saw productions in languages I didn’t speak and even understood some of them, thanks to the grown-up magic of the stage.

But I also saw frenetic comedies based around mistaken identity, crossdressing and magic fairies. With characters bawdily named after bodily functions or parts best kept under wraps. So don’t tell me that Shakespeare, writing in 2025, wouldn’t have relished a 6-7 crack or two, nor that a 21st-century panto punter wouldn’t fit in just fine among the groundlings at the Globe.

So it’s full circle. Panto was a way to introduce my daughter to theatre, to storytelling. To impish mischief, a love of words. This is the way in. Others, particularly artist Joanne Coates, have written better than me about the importance of working class irreverence in pantomime, how it’s one of the last remaining bastions of communality. But for me, it complements reading as a means of unlocking imagination.

Alicia’s first panto trip had her anxiously reminding us (and more importantly herself) that it was just pretend and the baddies weren’t really baddies. Since then, she’s graduated to MacBeth, and baddies soaked in gallons of prop-cupboard blood. We’ve queued for ice cream (happily poison free) during the interval of Twelfth Night while carefully putting a horribly convoluted plot back together. We’ve tackled songs from the shows and hit the West End for Frozen: The Musical. And each December, we keep coming back for panto. This year, Snow White at The Witham in Barnard Castle. It’s behind us both, and our love of theatre.