It hasn't snowed at all in Ambridge. Not a flake. Not a flurry. The weather is so clement that Tony Archer, never profligate, has coughed up for a fully condensing heat recovery refrigeration unit (I have no idea) and Nigel Pargeter has hired an ice rink for his stately home, Lower Loxley. It is typical of the blessed bubble we inhabit in Ambridge that all our students are gainfully employed as elves.
Lower Loxley has become a sunny winter wonderland. A German market ("Ompah! Ompah!"), Santa's grotto ("Ho! Ho!) and herds of reindeer sweeping down to the ha-ha ("Ha! Ha!"). The lights, the music, the mistletoe, the gluhwein! "I've never seen such gaiety!" as Cole Porter once remarked, and Cole knew all about gaiety.
Now a little something for the grown-ups. This year, Linda's panto is proving an unexpectedly post- watershed production. During rehearsals, Harry, the well-spoken milkman, swept away by long repressed passion, kissed Fallon, the barmaid of The Bull, with more fervour than the script required. Harry is Dick Whittington and this is the unsavoury sort of thing you get when you tinker with tradition and cast a man as the principal boy. Linda was initially delighted. "Good! That's more like it." Then, as time passed, less so. "All right! All right! You can stop it there!" With luck, The Bull, rudderless since Sid snuffed it, will soon have a new landlord.
It is turkey-strangling time at the Grundys' and Ed and Wilyum are at each other's throats amid the disconsolate warbling of the doomed birds and the fog of feathers. Wilyum carries an old grudge and, unfortunately, being a keeper, a shotgun and chainsaw as well.
Still, all in all, Ambridge is a place like Cheers, where everyone knows your name. Even the crew are chosen for the loaminess of their names. Producers are called Oates and Greengrass but my all time favourite is Lizzie Calfe who used to do the sound effects. You should just hear her dying turkey.
