How the panto really went… (Jim’s Diary)

The pantomime is over, thank God.. I am still here in Poole waiting to take my boat back
home to ocean village in Southampton. The boat has been away up until now in Plymouth
having stabilisers fitted to her. A captain brought her back from Plymouth to Poole for me
as I was busy rehearsing a job lot of dancers and a team of people masquerading as actors..
The only person that I casted for this pantomime was Lucy O’Neill Clark…. She is a
choreographer and dancer from Torquay who I met a few years ago. She would play the cat
and choreographed the show and also act as assistant director alongside me.

There was a series of casting balls ups for this, initially Miles Crawford was to play fairy
godmother. I was going to play the rat and I initially asked Darren Day to play Dick. He
couldn’t do it because of commitments, so I asked Bobby Davro. He agreed to do it and
then pulled out of it two months later because he’d been offered other work. This meant I
could not find someone to play Dick Whittington. I was persuaded to play Dick myself and
get another rat…. Also, Miles Crawford pulled out of the show because he was offered other
work as well……. I needed a fairy godmother and a rat. I opted for my old friend Debbie
Arnold to play the fairy. I’d known her for 40 years. She did my TV shows back in the 70s and
80s and up until recently was recording for Ustreme TV in a programme called girl talk.
Somebody suggested John Altman to be the rat. I’d met him once, he’s a nice guy and
played nasty Nick Cotton in EastEnders.

Lucy and I decided that we could not have young dancers. They would not put up with the
smut and drive us mad with their woke bullshit, So I contacted some of the old birds…. Jo
Urche thought it was an April fool joke. My agent Chris Davis has played pantomime Dame
in some amateur productions, I asked him if he wanted to do this… he jumped at the chance
of playing Fanny the cook. Comedian Danny Posthill will play captain cringe and a young guy
called Jake Moyes who used to work for me as an editor and is now a disc jockey in Norfolk
agreed to play Boson Minge. I asked Des feehely to play Alderman fitzwarren, he agreed
and the scene was set and we all met for a read through……. The read through went great
and I noticed that John Altman would play the part his way…. All actors are different.
The read through completed, we all put in our Diaries that the rehearsals would start on the
8th of June… in Wimborne Dorset.. We all met for rehearsals… and it was the first time that
the cast and the dancers got together. Previous to this I had been three or four days in the studio with Alan Rogers an Adam van Ryn recording the music that would be played back during the show….. A lot of this stuff had been regurgitated from previous pantomimes and was written by me and Alan Rogers.

During the first days of rehearsal we all bonded and had a great time. On day 2 John had
to go to a funeral so would miss a day’s rehearsal. He’s a great actor and I was convinced
he would catch up.

I imagined people would be off the book as they say having learnt the words in that first
week… and don’t forget they have all had the script for two months.
The weekend arrived and we went into the theatre for the first time….. The set looked like it
had been made out of a few cardboard boxes and painted….. The theatre is not geared for
musical theatre when it comes to sound. They just have two stacks of speakers flown each
side of the stage with no other speakers down the theatre…. Consequently the sound has to
be so loud at the front to carry to the back. It is a recipe for disaster and proved to be so.
The crew were quite good they were a bit aloof, but I thought that was just me.
I started to notice that certain members of the cast could not get any of the words right….
On the dress run the fairy was still holding a script in their hand. John really had a problem
delivering the lines that I had written and tended to growl a lot…

The opening night was upon us.
The show started with king rat. John paraphrased the opening speech…. It was awful. The
fairy came on and forgot her lines…. I then came on and rescued it.

This is how it happened all the way through the five nights and seven show run…….. Debbie
got really nasty with me because she said I was bullying her but I and the rest of the cast
knew that the problem was she did not know her lines…. Nor did John Altman. The show
that I had carefully written turned into a free for all with just one mistake after another and
me and Danny filling in…. The show went down really well with the audience because they
liked all the mistakes but I didn’t want it to be like that .I was depressed and fed up and
there are people in that show that I probably won’t see ever again.

The dancers and the cat were magnificent…. Danny and Jake were brilliant as was Chris
Davis as Fanny, Des tried his hardest, but to be honest I was terribly let down by Debbie
Arnold, a good friend who spent most of this time backstage bad mouthing me because she
could not remember her words.

I will spend hours trying to make this show into a DVD that is funny.. The audiences loved
the show and we got standing ovations every night…. I just can’t help thinking how good it
would have been if certain people actually said the words that I had written.)