Many of our hard-pressed surviving theatres will, by now, have rolled out the seasonal pantomime programmes.
For them, the crowd-pleasing, footfall-friendly cash cow or magic beans of Jack and the Beanstalk, the carpet ride of Aladdin, palatial balls of Cinderella, or the golden eggs of Mother Goose and other familiar staples will help them live to stage another year.
We flock to seasonal pantomime to enjoy the inversion of the usual norms and sense of order – class and status, wealth and gender. Harkening back to ancient festivals like the Roman Saturnalia, led by dissolute kings for a day or lords of misrule, panto is a safe and tame echo of the very drunken and licentious annual release valves which allowed pre-modern society to stick together for the rest of the year.
Certainly, after the year in public life we have just gone through, some safely managed civic release, not of the ‘black eye Friday’ kind, would be of great benefit to healing our communities. But what civic ceremonies and stories could possibly unite us at this stage of proceedings?
Possibly this might be a challenge beyond even the power of traditional panto. Among all the heroes and villains, I can’t think, with the exception of Dick Whittington and his Cat of any stories which have any great connection with place. Unlike his stage portrayal as an orphan who heads to London to have his dreams that the streets were paved with gold cruelly dashed, only to listen to bells of Bow urging to return and seek his destiny as a future London Mayor, the real Richard Whittington didn’t come from humble stock. And there is even doubt concerning the historical authenticity of his cat.
What we are missing is that sense of local folklore. Place-based narratives and stories from where we live, telling us who we are and where we stand in relation to our locality and what future we wish to build into.
According to UNESCO’s ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’, it seems another discontent to be racked up against the many sins of globalisation lie in the ‘grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction’ of local heritage such as folklore, which is seen as a ‘mainspring of cultural diversity’.
The well-choreographed series of mourning events leading up to the dignified state funeral of the late Queen Elizabeth II highlighted how, at the national level at least, we are capable of articulating a sense of who we are on the grand set-piece occasion. However, daily life cannot be nurtured and supported on such dazzling displays of grandeur and formality. We need substance, the informal and the ability to relate and connect.
Personally, I would like to think there is a place for creating some renewed form of local folklore to reflect both the historic roots as well as the current realities and aspirations of our communities. A municipal mythos can be connected to the past as a golden thread to unwind the path to a prosperous future.
I was struck how, at the start of October, during Localis’ fringe panel debates at the Conservative Party Conference, the very surroundings of the beautifully restored Birmingham Council House became a prime talking point at each session for what an empowered, entrepreneurial leader of place like Chamberlain can achieve.
Equally, history can for others be the nightmare from which an area can be trying to awake. One can empathise with the frustration of Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees that his city can be reduced to a trinity of ‘balloons, Brunel and (Clifton suspension) bridges’ – privileging a well-worn story of prosperity and innovation above social realities and housing needs.
The function of a modern local folklore should be to bridge our many divides and cement some sense of unity through diversity.
If there’s to be any hope our centralised system of hoarding power will relent and eventually roll down a settlement on the right local political units to run most services, demonstrably democratically and accountably, then the ‘big bang’ of devolution must not just empower local leaders. It must also give our communities and residents an engaged and actionable understanding of where power lies and of their own role as co-scriptwriters of a better plotted local future – whether new homes, social infrastructure or industrial strategy. And not just to shout out to the local political stage a warning of ‘It’s behind you!” to our county and metro mayors and the like.
Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis
@Localis
