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| It'll all come out in wash for Widow Twankey 05 December 2008 | |
| BILLY Riddoch's panto history at Eden Court dates back almost as long as the theatre itself. His first appearance was alongside the great Scottish comics Rikki Fulton and Walter Carr in "Cinderella" in 1978, just a couple of years after the theatre opened. "It was a great panto. We had Roy North from Basil Brush and a young Derek Fowlds who is now in 'Heartbeat' looking like an old Derek Fowlds. It was a huge cast — it nearly bankrupted the theatre," he said. Fortunately it did not, otherwise Riddoch, who plays the original panto Dame, Widow Twankey, in "Aladdin", would not have made the number of Eden Court panto appearances he has to his credit. By his calculation, this is the fifth Inverness panto he has appeared in and the third version of "Aladdin", having been a Chinese policeman with Tom O'Connor in the 1980s and the evil Abanazar on his last visit. "I've had one under every manager. It's funny the way things work out," the Aberdeen-born actor declared, laughingly suggesting that each time a director sees him, they will not have him back. So he is in a good position to admire — and be confused by — the changes Eden Court has undergone in the last few years. "It's very confusing if you've worked here before. What used to be there isn't there any more. But once you get the hang of it, it's great," Riddoch said. "I'm knocked out by the refurbishment — the theatre's lovely, the cinemas are out of this world — people should be proud of it and use it." Riddoch certainly hopes his relations will use it. With his in-laws in Inverness, his wife's family connections to Skye and his own to the east, there should be a few of his own relatives coming to see the show. The fact that Riddoch is an actor at all is probably down to his family ties with another Eden Court panto perennial, the late Jimmy Logan. Logan's parents were musical hall stars in their own right and after befriending Riddoch's businessman father, they would stay with the Riddoch family whenever they played in Aberdeen. "When they came up I used to go backstage at the theatre, so I suppose all that was going on," he said, but perhaps the main turning point came when he saw the Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard version of "Mutiny on The Bounty". The cast included a number of Scottish actors such as Gordon Jackson and Duncan Lamont, and the programme for the cast revealed where they had gone to do their drama training. "I thought: 'Wait a minute! There's a place in Scotland you can go and be trained to play cowboys and Indians?'" he declared. Keeping himself busy with amateur drama and as a drummer in a number of bands playing around Aberdeen at the time, it was not until he was 20 that Riddoch finally took the plunge and applied for drama school. "I did three years, came out of drama school and have never done anything else since," he said. |
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