Pantomime Time: N M Browne
From BBC archive Churchill Theatre's Cinderella. When I was a child my grandmother would take me to the panto in Cardiff each Christmas. I would squirm with embarrassment at the audience participation, but I adored the transformation scenes when the lights would change to flood the stage with magic; a pumpkin became a coach, a servant girl a princess, and the beast the handsome prince. I’ll be honest Panto is not a great preparation for life - don’t get me started on frog kissing, or on lying around on a bed of thorns waiting to be rescued - but it fed my imagination as a writer. Everyone knows that writing is all about transformation. Words on a page transform into story, the story transforms into a book and the humble scribe, by dint of performing a set of obscure magical tasks, is, with publication, transformed into a real writer just as surely as Pinoccio becomes a real boy. Once I accepted the logic of this, as I accepted that a...