First panto since the pandemic for Ben at the Kings

“The thing I really look forward to when I am doing panto is the backstage and that is so important. It is what you see reflected in show.

"The show has gags of course but if there is no chemistry backstage then you're not going to find it on the stage and it's just not going to be as good.

“And even in my relatively short panto career which is coming close to ten years, I just always look for that vibe backstage because that's what makes a panto. I worked together with Sean Smith (who was to have been at the Kings this year before pulling out) in Sleeping Beauty in Horsham.

"It was my second time at the Capitol and I think it was his first and we just felt so comfortable working together and we had a fantastic time.

“I just love panto. It's great fun. I'm only doing retro old school gigs at the moment but you feel like when you go on stage doing panto you don't have to prove yourself all the time.

"You are there in front an audience that wants to have fun, that want you to win. You're not trying to sell new records. I'm originally from the music industry and you are always trying to push records but with panto you know that the audience is smiling as soon as you walk on.

“And I love it because I know I'm very comfortable on the stage. I talk to the stage very comfortably and I enjoy a crowd and if something goes wrong I know that I don't go to pieces.

“For a really good panto, I think the story is really important. You've got to have that traditionalism and that authenticity and then you've also got to have the gags. And you've got to have things like the 12 Days of Christmas and the ghost gag and all those kinds of things and you also need to have a great dame. The dame role holds the whole thing together and you also need a great villain.

"That’s why Beauty And The Beast is hard because there's not really a villain. But with this you've got the wicked sisters and if you get all those things right then everything else just comes together. You see should pantos where the cast go off piste and are corpsing, laughing at their in-jokes and maybe a little bit of that is fine but you don't want to do that too much. It's all about the audience.

"The last time I did panto was in 2019, and then of course it was pandemic, and the pandemic was incredibly tough. The first three months I was wondering what was going on.

"It was just so weird and I was a little bit upset. I was on tour with a nostalgia band that I have and we had to pull the tour and for a while I just thought the pandemic was just happening to me and that it was just there to ruin my world but I realised that it was happening to everyone and I soon snapped out of that mentality!”