Huge accolade for Eastbourne panto at The Pantomime Awards 2025

The winners of The Pantomime Awards 2025, staged in partnership with Trafalgar Entertainment and ATG Entertainment, were announced by the UK Pantomime Association at a ceremony full of song and laughter at the New Victoria Theatre, Woking.

Chris said: “The UK Pantomime Association was set up to recognise the importance of pantomime in theatres across the whole of the country and to celebrate its achievements. Therefore, I am absolutely thrilled to have won the Best Direction Award for “Snow White”. It’s a testament to the hard work and commitment of the whole team that go towards making the Devonshire Park Theatre Eastbourne Pantomime so special.”

The awards ceremony featured special guest performances from Anita Harris, family favourite Basil Brush with award-winning comedian and cabaret performer Kevin Cruise (aka Martin Cabble-Reid) and ITV Britain’s Got Talent rising star ventriloquist Jamie Leahey.

For Chris, the award crowns a proud record in Eastbourne. Since 2001 – with a year off for Covid – Chris has written and directed 23 Eastbourne pantos

“What we have always tried to do is make it all about the quality of the show. Panto for so many of us is our first experience of live theatre. It is what children come to for the first time and we've got to give them a really high-quality unique live theatre experience that will hook them and will get them away from their iPads and their computers and their TikTok. And if you get it right you might get them for life. If you get it wrong you will lose them.

“But I get frustrated when people say that pantomime is just for the children. Like when people see Christmas dinner as something that you have to do even if you don't want to. I want people to come to our panto and say ‘Wow! I was not expecting that quality of artist or that quality of comedy or that quality of music!’ I want people to come to see one of our pantos and get the quality that you would expect from a West End comedy. If you do that then they will come back and you will embed panto as part of their Christmas celebrations. We all like a traditional Christmas, don't we, and I want our panto to become a family tradition for people.

“Pretty much every year I speak to people who came to see one of our pantos as a child and are now bringing their own children and they tell me that they haven't missed many in between. And that makes me feel really proud. And the fact is that we have doubled our size of audience over the years which is obviously great for audience development.”

The point is that pantomime is absolutely vital for the venues. As Chris puts it, if the venues need to make £3x in a year, then the panto is £x. In other words, in Eastbourne a third of the three venues’ profits from the year needs to come from panto.

“Really you've got the key elements. For me the story is king. These are fairy tales and they are the greatest stories. The whole of panto comes from commedia dell’arte and you've got characters in the story with fixed functions but the story is king and I get frustrated by some big commercial pantos where the story is secondary to the big-name comedian. The children really care that Aladdin is going to get out of the cave and that Jack will go up the beanstalk and that the Prince will rescue Sleeping Beauty. That's what really matters.

“The story is a key element and you've got to add some more sophisticated comedy, some comedy that is a little bit more surreal or a bit bizarre and then sprinkle that with some really great music. And casting is key as well. I get so frustrated with lazy casting where people think that if you've got a top of the bill name for the dame, then you anybody can play the Princess. The point is you’ve got to try to find the best talents available to play every role.”