Pen's Nest

I have a major gripe with The Archers⁽¹⁾.

Every year they put on a show—a panto⁽²⁾, or a variety show—but they always do it on a professional schedule. The scriptwriters seem to think a bunch of amateurs who don't even have an organisation dedicated to producing theatre can actually put on a competent panto in three weeks. (I assume one of them, once upon a time, asked one of the actors who was sneaking off to play Buttons⁽³⁾ in Milton Keynes how long they'd have to write him out for, and that's what he told them.) Personally, I don't believe it. Even if the farmers, in winter, are willing to spend their days in the village hall slapping their thighs⁽⁴⁾ and learning to walk in heels⁽⁵⁾ (which I doubt), the people who work in offices, hotels, shops etc can't possibly do so. Add in the fact that amateurs are probably less competent at acting, less practised at learning lines (and, optionally, music) and less able to understand what the director is trying to get them to do, than their professional equivalents, and putting together a show in a few haphazard evenings here and there just is Not Going To Happen.

Also, I bet the village hall just isn't available for rehearsals. Village halls are incredibly busy places, what with the regular exercise classes, the flower club, the WI, the bird-watching society once a month, the salsa group, the railway enthusiasts, the yoga sessions, and somebody's 21st every other Friday night. If you don't have a regular slot booked, you're screwed. Especially in the run-up to Christmas.

So what they need, in Ambridge⁽⁶⁾, is an actual theatre group, who meet regularly and organise shows in advance. It's possible that now, in 2012, they do have such a group—I finally lost interest during the great Grundy tribulations of 2005⁽⁷⁾, so I don't know. But up until then, it was always "Let's put on a show in a barn!" Except for not actually putting the show on in the barn: although there are plenty of barns around Ambridge, they always seem to be full. Probably full of silage, whatever that is.

In The Archers, they never seem to have any trouble choosing a script for their panto. What's more, they never seem to pay for it, which definitely ain't right. (There are about a thousand scripts available for any given panto, but they all cost *something*. Ideally, someone will read a bunch of them and pick the one most likely to work… not in Ambridge, though.) It's even possible that someone locally writes the script, in the week between deciding to put on the show in the barn and assembling the perfect cast from the local yokels. Ahahahaha.

No. Just, no.

We have a pantomime on our performance schedule for December this year. The directors have been looking at scripts for months. The auditions will be in July. It's true that the rehearsals won't get started at full power until after our big musical (early October), but there will be a light rehearsal schedule before then, and everyone will be expected to know their lines beforehand. Seven, maybe eight weeks, is not very much time to get a panto together, even with three rehearsals a week—not a full-size panto with adult chorus. It's more plausible with a small-scale, principals-only deal, but even then—amateurs can only rehearse in the evenings and at weekends, for the very good reason that most of them have day jobs. No-one on The Archers' scriptwriting team seems to be aware of this.

And don't forget to consider the scenery, props and costumes. A pantomime usually has a very complicated set, with lots of different scenes and at least one 'gag' involving specialist scenery. For example, in our fairly recent Cinderella we had a scene in a 'beauty parlour', during which one of the Ugly Sisters had her legs wound into a knot, and the other one was boiled. In Aladdin, one of the principals was put through a mangle and came out flat. We're lucky to have a really brilliant bunch of set constructors, plus an amazingly talented scenic artist, but they have to have the time to get this stuff made!

One more thing: there isn't usually a lot of attention paid to, well, paying for this stuff. An ad hoc theatre group isn't going to have the funds to pay for rehearsal space, buy or rent scenery, hire costumes, buy or rent scripts etc etc etc. Many of these things have to be done in advance of selling those tickets… The productions in Ambridge miraculously attract packed houses every year, even though there are but three dozen people living in the village (although to be fair, it may for all we know be additionally populated by any number of nameless mutes)—thus, nobody is bankrupted by putting up the cash in advance. But I wish we knew their secret.

Frankly, it's high time somebody on the scriptwriting staff had a look at how amateur theatre groups actually work, and realised that Ambridge's annual panto really is put on in Fairyland.


⁽¹⁾ For the 90% of you who are baffled by this reference, The Archers is a very long-running radio soap set in a farming community, with a 15-minute episode on Radio 4 every evening, Sunday-Friday.

⁽²⁾ Panto, or pantomime: interactive theatre of a traditional kind, in which the audience knows its script whether the actors do or not.

⁽³⁾ Buttons: Cinderella's hapless sidekick, a doofus who is hopelessly in love with her and spends a lot of time telling the audience how wonderful she is.

⁽⁴⁾ The women, or 'Principal Boys', who traditionally wear abbreviated tunics, fishnets and boots.

⁽⁵⁾ The men, or 'Dames', who cross-dress with varying degrees of glamour in the interests of comedy.

⁽⁶⁾ The imaginary village at the heart of the show, set nebulously somewhere in the Midlands-ish farming country.

⁽⁷⁾ Trust me, you don't want to know.