CBeebies favourite is our Robin Hood in Worthing this Christmas

And if you like, you can probably catch him in two different pantos on the same day. He is also in the CBeebies panto this year.

For Nigel, Robin Hood on the stage is a lovely prospect: “I think Robin Hood as a panto has died away a little bit over the years so to be coming back to it now and to be able to play this role is going to be great. I think I'm going to try to play it a little bit different. Robin Hood can be played in so many different ways but I'm going to play him very much as a cheeky chappie type, a lovable rogue, and maybe what he is doing is very much on point for the times when you think about him redistributing wealth! But I'm a man of very simple means as Robin. I live in the woods!

“This will be my third panto, and I just love doing panto. It's a great time of the year and it's really lovely that I have worked with some really great casts. Before that I hadn't done panto massively so I came to it with perhaps a bit more of an open mind. A lot of people always think that it's got to be done in a certain way and that you have to slap your thigh but I come to it much more from a place of thinking ‘Let's try something new maybe.’ And I think the director likes that, just trying new things, and I think the cast like that as well. I know you want to have the traditions but when you look back at some of the things that used to be done you wouldn't be able to do them now. So you have got to have that mix really. You've got to find different ways of getting the same laughs and it does mean that you can move with the times.

“I did Chesterfield last year and that was an Aladdin. The first panto I did was Cinderella at the Hawth in Crawley. That was in 2021, not the pandemic year but the following year. I did my first panto when I was seven or eight and I didn't do panto again until I did a couple of CBeebies pantos and actually they're not that much different. You do a real panto for one weekend which is then edited together. You perform in front of a live audience but just for the one weekend, four shows which are all filmed and then put together.”

As for Nigel’s own Christmas this year, there will be Christmas Eve performances and then he will be back with his family at home for Christmas Day and then he suspects that the family will come back with him to Worthing to watch the show on Boxing Day and to stay awhile.