Katherine completes principal boy panto bingo in Eastbourne

She’s delighted to be teaming up once again with familiar faces including Martyn Knight, celebrating his 18th Eastbourne pantomime, as Widow Twankey and comic Tucker as Wishee Washee. But there is added personal significance for Katherine as well: “This one this year actually means that I have completed the principal boy bingo in Eastbourne. I've done all the principal boys now that (panto producer) Chris Jordan does.

“I love being the principal boy. A huge part of it is my height at five foot eight. By the time I've got my heels on I am nearly six foot and I'm towering over everybody. But it's also a really fun part to play. You get all the adventure moments. Chris and I were talking about that a lot. There is a lovely sense that when you've got a principal boy who is a girl then you are showing that anybody can have an adventure, whether they are a boy or a girl. You are showing that adventures are open to anyone but really I just love doing those parts – partly also because you are there helping to push the story along. In panto everybody has got a role to play. It's not my role to be cracking the jokes and making people laugh. That's for someone else to do. My role is to keep the story moving.”

These days you don't see so many principal boys who are girls: “But (producer) Chris does it quite a lot. I think one of the reasons you don't see it so much is that lots of celebrities get put into that principal boy role with their slicked-back hair just because they are names that people might know. Chris would rather have the traditional principal boy. But I do think people are starting to do panto a bit differently these days. I went with Chris to the panto awards last year and you get a sense of different people doing things in different ways but in Eastbourne we pride ourselves on doing very much a traditional panto – but a traditional panto with a slight twist of modern songs. Definitely in some places I do think they're pushing the envelope with their pantos but I just love what we do here, a really traditional take. It is just lovely.” And it helps of course to know the venue: “You feel that you know the audience a bit and you know the kind of people that come along and you know the kinds of things that they like. I was in Newark last year and it was a bit different, a slightly different atmosphere. I just feel that people in Eastbourne particularly love panto. I'm not saying they didn't in Newark but it was our first year there whereas Eastbourne is an established venue, and it is lovely to be working with Martyn and with Tucker again. I've worked with them three times before. You get to know them. You get to have your own dynamic with them, and just working with them again feels like slipping into a really comfortable pair of shoes.” www.eastbournetheatres.co.uk.