Goldilocks

The panto at The Kings Theatre is an Edinburgh Christmas institution. With a history dating back to 1906's debut performance of Cinderella, it's as part and gift-wrapped parcel of the festive season in the capital as mince pies, holly and carol singing. But despite an otherwise standard-issue Auld Reekie upbringing, The Skinny had never been to one before now.

So it was with some surprise to note this is institution as in the Macpherson report into the Stephen Lawrence murder. Like many others, The Skinny had previously viewed political correctness as another example of a North American lack of irony, nothing that couldn't be handled with a degree of common sense and tolerance. But after taking a friend's nine year old son to Goldilocks at The Kings, the case for a more formal approach to prejudice begins to seem reasonable.

If this was edgy drama aimed at intellectual sophisticates used to dealing with moral ambiguity then bring it on but faced with the serried ranks of attitudinal blank slates, children in their formative years in the very act of forming their opinions, then some authorial responsibility is called for. Certainly not casual racism. Okay Polish plumber gags aren't exactly the slaying of Martin Luther King but it's that very throwaway inconsequentiality that makes them so offensive. Nor snobbery. With an audience composed largely of middle class kids in cub and school uniforms, the jokes mocking the good folks from Niddrie – a council estate on Edinburgh's outskirts – seemed particularly egregious. Sexism of course came with the story but a few positive female roles might have gone some way to counterbalance its dated narrative rather than the aggregate character 'girls' which merely served as a clumsy cipher for promiscuity. Even the forced humour couldn't disguise the sad truth of our nation's favourite anti-social behaviour: binge drinking. Oh how we laughed as Allan Stewart's character Gertie downed a pint of Cr'me de Menthe mixed with whisky, gin and vodka, reeled hilariously around the stage for a good thirty seconds and was then fighting fit to continue his/her search for the next minority to victimise, neatly missing out the potentially violent, puking and incapacitated stages familiar to our mature readers.

The ritualised call and response of the whole pantomime form lends itself with chilling precision to the inculcation of values. The boo and hiss of the villain, the 'behind you' mentality drumming, with each ritualised interaction, entire value systems into gullible heads. And here's the point: the squawking rows of pre-teens had no conception of the drawbacks of heavy drinking, or indeed the societal injustices that lead to sink estates or the sinister undertones to racial stereotyping but presumably the writer(s) did and they should know better.