When Doing Panto Wasn’t All Fun And Games!

The Great Gordino
Written by gordino

I’m writing this on Jan 10th 2012, and something just reminded me of doing pantomime tours. I was reminded of times when it wasn’t all fun and games, and it’s a great goal achievement point…

The specific memory was of actually doing shows on January 10th in years gone by – yep, that’s right, doing pantos on January 10th.

In fact some tours lasted right into late January.

Doing the shows in the run up to Christmas is great – in the clubs, all the decorations are up, the parents are in the mood to have fun, and the whole Christmas atmosphere is in full swing.

In the schools, the cards are up, the kids have their homemade decorations up on the walls, and the sense of excitement is crisp in the air.

Doing a show in environments like that is, in a word, fun!

In the period between Christmas and New Year, the atmosphere has cooled a bit, but there is still a holiday feel to it all. Once you get past New Year though, it’s all gone.

The parents have gone back to work, the kids have gone back to school. There are no decorations to be seen anywhere.

And yet there we were, performing a 2 hour panto. Now, don’t get me wrong, the show still worked, we would change little bits here and there to take out the Christmas references.

Throw in the performance skills of the cast(!), and you have a show that gets the kids going. It just doesn’t quite work as well as before Christmas, the bite in the air has gone.

The work load is still the same, let me tell you! You’re still travelling 1500 miles a week, up to 3 shows a day, getting changed in small rooms smelling of sweat and urine (that’s the rooms smelling, not me!)

You’re still getting up in the small hours of the morning, tired, cold and hungry.
Mentally, the time to the end of the show’s run seems to stretch out.

This is the time when you really earn the money, when you pay part of the price for achieving the goal – the hard work!

The high of doing the show is still there, the fun of doing something you enjoy and doing it professionally, but the hard slog aspects of the job really hit home as just that – a hard slog.

Once you’ve done one tour, you know full well what to expect if you go on another, and that’s the point of this article – the learning experience helps to prepare you for the future, and you had better be prepared to put in the really hard work that comes with the good bits.

The Great Gordino

Doing panto tours was a goal for me, and like most, if not all goals, it’s not all fun and games the whole time!

‘Til Next Time,
Health & happiness,
Gordon
P.S. Me doing panto tours was as a *direct* result of me following my 8 step goal achievement formula – you can get my free video series going over it!

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