Recently, he has spread his wings into directing them as well, and will this year be presiding over Aladdin at the Richmond Theatre in west London, freshly updated for the 21st century, with Callow as Abanzar and Kensit as the Genie. “For many people, panto will be their very first trip to the theatre. If they’ve enjoyed themselves, then their interest in theatre could well last a lifetime I really believe this, you know. I most sincerely do.”His large blue eyes bulge, and his cheeks, now filled with panini, do likewise.Christopher Biggins is, of course, a pantomime legend, an appropriately camp-as-Christmas D-list celebrity who has now been popping up in grotesque slap for 29 years. “Once upon a time, actors of a certain calibre used to pooh-pooh the idea of panto, considering it beneath them,” he says, “but Ian McKellen has changed all that.” (The great man last year appeared as Widow Twankey at the Old Vic, under the direction of Kevin Spacey – and is doing so again this Yuletide.) “And now, I’m delighted to say, other actors of a similar clout, like dear Mr Callow over there, have followed suit.
“And that’s absolutely essential in order to keep it alive,” he continues. The cafe is filled with other actors also in rehearsal – not just unspectacular Hollyoakers, but proper thesps: Simon Callow, his co-star in Aladdin, and, three tables away, Richard Wilson, soon to be seen in Cinderella This pleases Biggins enormously, and here’s why.

But I certainly hear him, his big booming voice in full song to the accompaniment of a piano and, somewhere in the background, a far more dulcet Patsy Kensit, who tra la las all the way to the chorus. At the stroke of one, he breaks for lunch, welcomes me like a long lost friend, and leads me to the adjacent cafe where he treats me to a mozzarella panini. They were born in the 1930s and they’ve had a go-nowhere career for a very long time, with poor Herb constantly under Kiki’s vicious thumb. We’re supposed to be bad, but you have to be pretty good before you do bad convincingly.”. In the very best tradition of the very cheesiest of pantomimes, I don’t actually see Christopher Biggins when I first arrive at the south London studio at which he is busy rehearsing Aladdin The reason for this? He is, in a very real sense, behind me. Soon everybody wanted Kiki causing havoc at their party, and my partner Kenny developed Herb, Kiki’s feeble-minded pianist sidekick, and we dreamed up a back history for the pair. On the night I’d smoked a little hash and listened to The Cure and gotten in this evil mood.

I showed up in this dress and out came this really bad character who started kicking people’s drinks over and sang all these pop numbers in a terrible way People seemed to love it. One of the most important things to happen in Stanislavsky’s studio was a Dickens adaptation, so we’re hardly pioneers. Snobbery afflicts us all, whether it’s about looking down on someone because of their education, or their tastes, or the political views they hold. But it’s very satisfying to be working with Dickens’s language, and helping actors learn how to roll out those long, rich sentences on the big RSC stage.”Justin BondKiki of Kiki & Herb, the New York double act, whose ‘Jesus Wept’ is at the Queen Elizabeth Hall”Kiki was born 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of glamour drag and a friend in San Francisco asked me if I would perform at his birthday party.

And Dickens was honest enough to show that he knew how it felt to grow up grander than your parents, and the sense of guilt and ambivalence that brings. The book also hinges on the need to grow up and move away and find yourself. There’s a touch of Miss Havisham’s inability to let go in all of us. Of course, you can’t fit the whole book into two hours of theatre. But I work quite a lot in Russia, where the stock-in-trade is adaptations of huge Russian novels, and they think of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as big theatrical writers. The thing about Pinocchio’s desire to become a flesh-and-blood boy is that he has to acquire moral sense.