Jason Manford: ‘Standup’s lonely – I love the panto family’
Panto was my first experience of going to the theatre. At school in south Manchester, there were free tickets for kids from underprivileged backgrounds. I must have been 10 or 11 and I thought theatre really wasn’t for me. It was a stuffy place where people went to see Shakespeare or Chekhov, stroked their beards and had a good think. The idea that you could shout out to the actors, and they’d shout back, was sort of magical. You didn’t feel like an imposter. You felt like you were there for a reason.
