Doctor Who’s Catherine Tate Delivers Laughs For Palladium Pantomime

EXCLUSIVE: British television comedy queen Catherine Tate sashays across the room where rehearsals for Sleeping Beauty, the 10th annual feast of fun (and filth), are taking place. Performances begin at the historic London Palladium on Saturday through January 11.

Tate’s doing evil witchy things in her role as Carabosse, the wicked sister of King Julian, played by Julian Clary, a stalwart of the peculiarly British holiday variety show that’s full of gaiety, wit, singing, dancing that’s a centuries-old staple in theaters the length and breadth of the British isles held in this season we’re to be jolly in.

There’s tape in the rehearsal hall outlining where the Palladium stage will be. My seat is set dead center, close to the edge of that tape. I almost don’t catch what Tate says as she passes. When I process her words, they’re something to the effect that I should run off and make hay with her. 

Laugher erupts from my mouth with such a force that that I begin to fear my time is coming. It’s no joke that the psychological benefits of continuous laughing can help lessen your stress, according to the Mayo Clinic. And Britain’s own Action Mental Health organization insists that having a larf releases endorphins and boosts the immune system and mood. 

But what about heart palpitations from guffawing too much?

Michael Harrison, overlord of Crossroads Pantomimes, leans over to make sure I’m all tickety-boo.

And then Clary enters and barks on about his corgis Tess and Tickels and proceeds to tell us, “I’m often to be found in the Palace Gardens late at night, calling out, ’Tess, Tickles,’” pausing to add, ”and I don’t have to wait for long.”

It’s filth, I tell you. Oh, no it isn’t.

I ask Clary if Harrison, his director and co-creator, ever suggests where to draw the line. “Well, Michael very rarely says, ‘That’s too much.’ Other directors might’ve done in the previous pantos I’ve done. And it’s a London thing as well. I think they want it. They want that,” he insists.

The ruder the better? “Yeah,” Clary responds thoughtfully. “I mean it’s got to be a vague innuendo, and therefore it’s all just in their mind.”

So how smut-minded do you think we are? I venture to ask. “Who knows? It’s what I’ve done all my life, so I’m just carrying on regardless and enjoying myself,” Clary reasons.

Sleeping Beauty welcomes back Palladium regulars Nigel Havers (Black Ops, Chariots of Fire) as Keeper of the Privy; ventriloquist Paul Zerdin as The Great Zerdini; Jon Culshaw (The Queen’s Corgi, Horrible Histories) as King Julian’s private detective; Rob Madge (It’s Not All Sunshine & Rainbows), who opens the show as The Diva of Dreams; Emily Lane (Hello, Dolly at London Palladium) as Princess Aurora; and Amonik Melaco, who was in last year’s chorus but is now promoted to play Prince Peter.   

It’s Tate’s first panto, ever. Oh, yes it is!

She simply has never been asked before. Her television comedy hits like The Catherine Tate Show and Catherine Tate’s Nan are wonders that are viewed on repeat over and over.Tate also has an enormous fan base from her time on Doctor Who.

Tate saw last year’s Robin Hood show and calls the Palladium panto “a riot” and a “cavalcade of comedy, and the objective is to entertain people.”

Harrison explains that they had a structure for the script when they began rehearsals. Then, as they worked through the material, much has been changed “and we’ve found things because Catherine and Julian, well, they’re very good at riffing off each other, and then you find something that you could never have written on paper,” the showman adds.

Harrison says getting Tate to see Robin Hood last year was instrumental in persuading her to agree play the Palladium. “I always say the best way to get somebody to do it at the Palladium is to invite them to come and see it. They’ll either be completely turned off and not want to, or they’ll go, ‘Right, I get this and I want to be part of it.’ And she wanted to be part of it, which I was thrilled about.“

Harrison and choreographer Karen Bruce are alert to every beat as Tate performs in front of us. People forget, says Harrison, “that she’s a very good actress” who can switch from character to character with each turn of her head.

But, upon pain of death by tickling stick, I’m quite rightly forbidden from imparting which roles from her repertoire Tate employs in the show.

Sleeping Beauty looks to be in good nick. And the funny business is deliciously, wickedly funny. There’s a skit where the words “peasant pheasant plucker” are bandied about. Again, my life is over If I dare to mention Tate’s diamond contribution to this gag.

You know, ethics and all that. 

Last weekend the company shifted from the Jerwood Space in Southwark and traveled across the Thames and on into the heart of town to the Palladium, located between Oxford Street tube station and Liberty’s department store.

It’s where Evita star Rachel Zegler entertained throngs of onlookers nightly with her outdoors rendering of Tim Rice’s and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ear-wormy “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from the Palladium balcony.

During the tech, Harrison has been showing off the Forest of Thorns that grows while the princess sleeps.

A few years ago he presented Jack and the Beanstalk with a beanpole that sprouted across the stage and reached up beyond the flies, but for Sleeping Beauty, set designer Mark Walters and his colleagues have exceled themselves with a Forest of Thorns that makes the beanstalk look “quite pathetic” by comparison, Harrison boasts. “It’s going to be all over the theater, really coming out the ceiling and out of everywhere,” he reveals.

Sleeping Beauty is the 10th Palladium Pantomime, with no break, because Harrison and his team managed to present a panto during Covid that was attended by William and Catherine, the Prince and Princess of Wales, and their three kids. 

Still, Harrison’s amazed to have reached 10 seasons. “I thought we might get one or two, and then by Year 3, I think by the time we’d won the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment. And then when we did Snow White with Dawn French, it just took off,” Harrison says, smiling.

Thousands wait in the online queue when tickets are released. “It’s a very, very loyal fan base for this show,” he says. “The audience are as much part of it as anything. … It’s become a tradition.”

Audience analysis shows that a significant number of North Americans book Palladium panto seats. 

Harrison’s been asked a couple of times to take panto to the U.S.

Nodding his head, he says: “I like the fact that we only do it here. I like the fact that it’s ours. It belongs to us. You know what you’re going to get at the Palladium Pantomime. You know what it is. You know what the content’s going to be. You know what the style of humor’s going to be.”

What’s more, people want more of it. Oh, yes they do!

“People are booking earlier and earlier and earlier. And there’s demand for a show like this,” Harrison says while noting that the box office already is selling standing-only tickets.

Julian Clary’s the show’s mainstay, and it’s essentially built around him and the guest star. “He’s wonderful, isn’t he?” Harrison says, pointing to Clary seated a few chairs away. “He just holds court.”

I trot off to pay my respects, and he’s most gracious in calling me “a fresh face” and “we hear the odd little laugh,or the odd loud laugh” coming from my direction . Not sure he saw me collapse in a heap when Tate did her walk-by.

Clary admits that he never imagined that the Palladium Pantomime would take off and return year after year.

“I remember Michael coming to my dressing room in the Birmingham Hippodrome hippo and saying, ‘We are going to do the Palladium next year.’  And this was after I’d spent 20 years in the provinces and it was all lovely. So to up it all and bring it here was just a dream, really,” Clary declares.

Clary’s unable to comprehend why the Palladium stopped presenting a proper, glitzy show there for three decades. “It just seemed to fade away and go out of fashion,” he sighs.

“Luckily, someone spotted a gap [Harrison, Webber and Edwin Shaw, the late wizard box-office executive]. And also to do it at the Palladium where the best pantos always was.”