Christmas may have come and gone, but the traditional Christmas Pantomime season is still in full swing. Twenty five years ago, when I was about seven years old, you could go and see such celebrities as Canon & Ball, Jim Davidson and Christopher Biggins treading the boards in garish costumes. They were at the height of their fame then, with hit TV shows watched by 15 million people, and they all gave up their Christmas period to go out to the people of the UK in towns like Bradford, Doncaster and Glasgow and dress up in drag. Imagine that today - Simon Cowell giving up his Christmas in the Bahamas with his fiance and ex girlfriend and donning a frock to have a thousand five year olds scream "He's behind you". It simply wouldn't happen. Nope, instead of A/B/C listers in the theatres of Great Britain, we still have Canon & Ball in Lincoln, Jim Davidson in Glasgow and Biggins in Wolverhampton despite none of them having been on television in a decade.
What always confused me about nearly every panto I saw was that the lead male character was played by a pretty woman, and the old chubby female character was always played by a man. I know that men have been playing women since Shakespearean times, but this high dose of transvestite exposure in a performance directed at school children is radically liberal, even for today. Add in lesbianism, where the male hero (played by a girl remember) is madly in love with the beautiful princess (again, played by a prettier girl) and every dad in the theatre has a fantasy to go home with. So really, the only person playing a character of their own gender and sexuality is the leading lady, a true rose amongst thorns.
What always confused me about nearly every panto I saw was that the lead male character was played by a pretty woman, and the old chubby female character was always played by a man. I know that men have been playing women since Shakespearean times, but this high dose of transvestite exposure in a performance directed at school children is radically liberal, even for today. Add in lesbianism, where the male hero (played by a girl remember) is madly in love with the beautiful princess (again, played by a prettier girl) and every dad in the theatre has a fantasy to go home with. So really, the only person playing a character of their own gender and sexuality is the leading lady, a true rose amongst thorns.
And this is exactly the best way of describing a wine from Dirk Niepoort. I tried the 2006 Niepoort Charme recently, and having sampled hundreds of big, chunky, Douro reds in the past, this was a true rose amongst thorns. That isn't to say that Douro wines are ugly fat men dressed in a frock, but they usually aren't light and delicate!
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