Bubblehammerblog

Slow posts over the past week or so. This is because I'm appearing in Panto in a small town in West Yorkshire. Despite being just over six feet I'm playing leading dwarf Soapy, in Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, an exhausting role that requires a wearisome amount of waddling around the stage in massively oversize boots. It's a talking part, & I have to painfully deliver my half dozen lines in a loud high pitched shriek. The theatre is only heated during performances so it's freezing. Snow White is being played by a preening young woman who once appeared in the teen soap Hollyoakes. Her dressing room has a one bar electric heater installed, & she refuses to share it with the rest of the cast.

For those who aren't familiar with Panto - it's a peculiarly English form of entertainment, performed usually for children, in order to humiliate entertainers with declining or extinct careers. I won't elaborate, since Panto is a national disgrace, which no country with claims to civilisation would countenance.

I earn a little more for my thrice weekly Panto appearances than I would for, say, collecting fares on the tram, or scanning groceries at a supermarket. Panto is the exception to my dictum that I wouldn't work for anyone daft enough to employ me.

I'm intending to take my revenge on the night of the final performance. Moments after the curtain I'll take the stage in my Soapy costume & deliver a speech to the assembled children & parents about the government's plans to encourage schools to routinely search pupils for drugs, weapons & stolen goods.

If my oratory is able to convey some of my outrage at this proposal, & touches the conscience of a single parent, before I'm bum's rushed off the stage & bundled away by security, then it'll be worth it.

For the past few days I've been putting together a draft speech. Were it not for the kiddies, it would begin Wake up, you stupid bastards!

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