"I"m bored with television," announced ankey from her easy chair in the Empyrean, switg off The Late Show and adjusting his/her falsies inside her eous red bustier. "I will desd again to Pantoland!"
In Pantoland,
Everything is grand.
Well, lets not exaggerate -- grandish. Not like what it used to be but, then, what is. Even so, all still brightly coloured -- garish, in fact, all your primaries, red, yellow, blue. And all excessive, so that your castle has more turrets than a regular castle, your forest is siderably more imperable than the average forest and, not infrequently, your cow has more than its natural share of teats and udders. Were talking multiple projes, here, spikes, sprouts, boobs, bums. Its a bristling world, in Pantolaher phallic or else demonically, aggressively female and theres something archaic behind it all, archai the worst sense. Something positively filthy.
But all also two-dimensional, so that Maid Marians house, in Pantolands fictive Nottingham, is flat as a pahe front door may well open when she goes in, but it makes a hollow sound behind her when she slams it shut and the entire fa?ade gets the shivers. Robin serenades her from below; she opens her window to riposte and what you see behind her of her bedroom is only a painted bedhead on a painted wall.
Of course, the real problem here is that it is Baron Hardup of Hardup Hall, father of derella, stepfather of the Ugly Sisters, who, these barren days, all too often occupies the post of Minister of Finan Pantoland. Occasionally, even now, the free-spenders such as Princess Badroulbador take things into their own hands and then you get some wonderful effects, such as a three-masted galleon in full sail breasting through tumultuous storms with thunder booming and lightning breaking about the spars as the gallant ship takes Dick Whittington and his cat either away from or else back to London amidst a nostalgic series of tableaux vivants of British naval heroes such as Raleigh, Drake, Captain Cook and Nelson, disc things or keeping the el safe flish shipping, while Dick gives out a full-throated tralto rendition of "If I had a hammer" with a chorus of rats in masks and tights, courtesy of the Italia ti school.
Illusion and transformation, kit into palace with the aid of gauze etc. etc. etc. You know the kind of thing. It all costs money. And, sometimes, as if it were the greatest illusion of all, there might be an incursion of the real. Real horses, perhaps, trotting, neighing and whinnying, large as life. Yet "large as life" isnt the right phrase, at all, at all. "Large as life" they might be, in the text of the auditorium, but when the prosium arch gapes as wide as the mouth of the ogre in Jad the Beanstalk, those forty white horses pulling the glass coach of the princess look as little and insequential as white mice. They are real, all right, but insignifit, and only raise a laugh or round of applause if one of them iently drops dung.
And sometimes therell be a dog, often one of those sandy-coloured, short-haired terriers. On the programmes, it will say: "Chuckles, played by himself," just above where it says: "Cigarettes by Abdullah." (Whatever happeo Abdullah?) Chuckles does everything they taught him at dog-school -- fetches, carries, jumps through a flaming hoop -- but now and then he fets his script, fets he lives in Pantoland, remembers he is a real dog precipitated into a wondrous world hts and pungend rustlin