A trip to the pantomime is a Christmas tradition but they also lift the January gloom and run later in the year The Christmas decorations have been packed away, kids are back at school and new year ...

There is an old joke. A veteran actor takes a job in pantomime. One night, as he straps on the back-end of a panto horse, he wonders aloud what happened to his career. A wag replies: "It’s behind you!

The great Victorian playwright George Bernard Shaw was not an admirer of pantomimes. He wrote in 1897 that this dramatic genre is “a glittering, noisy void”, which worries “the physical senses without ...