I Watched Jim Davidson’s Adult Panto II – Boobs in the Wood

[Part I: Sinderella — Part III: Closing the Cursed Trilogy]

Seeing as the response to my original piece about Jim Davidson’s adult panto, Sinderella, was the thing that pushed me into starting a Patreon, I figured I’d ruin another Christmas for myself, and sit down with its sequel, Boobs in the Wood. Though he shares a script credit with Bryan Blackburn; a writer for the Krankies and Cannon and Ball; Boobs in the Wood is a 105-minute ode to Jim’s absolute fucking loathing of women. It’s the manifesto they find in an incel’s pocket after he’s tazed for throwing jars of old cum up the walls of a yoga studio. When Todd Phillips said woke culture was killing comedy, this is the gold he meant.

Boobs was filmed in 1999, four years after Sinderella, which sadly wasn’t enough time for Charlie Drake to sleep off the amount of booze he put away. So who’s in this one? Finally accepting the general public’s desire to toss handfuls of human shit at him, Jim embraces his birthright as the baddie, and stars as the Sheriff of Nottingham, ‘Big’ Dick Dangling. His make-up’s very 1960’s Star Trek Klingon; all swarthy, with Nike-shaped sideburns, and a ginger goatee which looks like he’s been scoffing a big bag of Tesco-brand Wotsits, while the leather tunic and studded collar gives the impression he’s rushed to the theatre last minute, after a bruising session at a local S&M dungeon — “Stamp on as many balls as you can!”

Leather Daddy Jim’s joined by a couple of celebrities this time — Victor Spinetti, off films, as Friar Tuck/Try-a-Fuck, and the actual R2-D2, Kenny Baker; while the role of Fairy Dildo’s played by a woman who’d go on to marry Shane Richie. Most of the cast is made up of performers for whom Boobs is either their only credited work, or, in the case of Maid Marion Fitz-Tightly and Robin Hood, ‘The Sherwood Shagger,’ something that’s been strangely left off their extensive stage resumes on Spotlight. Probably a clerical error.

You may have noticed the character names are of a type, and the show begins with Kenny Baker telling the audience to “fuck off!” as Fairy Dildo introduces herself by miming a blowie. All this nicely sets the tone for almost two hours of dicks, tits, and assertions that all busty women need a ruddy good seeing to. After a very up-to-date reference about sending “a fairy fax,” and Dildo cupping herself to ask “are these tits real?” for a frighteningly aggressive “YES!” from the audience, we’re straight into a musical number. A Humping We Will Go is the first of many songs, marking Boobs‘ production values as way higher than Sinderella‘s, but its content — in something that truly didn’t seem possible — as even grottier.

“A humping we will go, a humping we will go; bend me over, tickle me tits and kiss me down below!” Set against a grim visual tableau of sex-obsessed Nottingham — a city full of “poofters and pervs” — its cast of energetic young dancers give it the earnest straight-out-of-stage-school projection, with choreography where women are always on their knees, singing into men’s crotches, or bent double with skirts hitched above their knickers, while the lads pump away in time to the beat. In the background, a man 69s a blow-up doll, while I note the presence of a black dancer, and wonder what he’s in store for. The more ‘professional’ production means most of the hilarious lyrics are lost, sung properly and moving too fast for an audience of men for whom finding out the work experience lad once saw a musical is reason enough to spunk in his tea for a joke, for being such a wild bummer.

We’re next into Maid Marion’s song about her “chas-titty belt.” Her boobs are mentioned in every scene, with the cast of lechers constantly staring, groping, or asking if she wouldn’t mind them “fingering you and feeling your bristols?” In scenes where she runs across the stage, Jim will improvise an excited cry of “wibbly wibbly wibbly!” or a “bob, bob, bobbling along!” accompanied by cartoon boinging noises. A virgin who’s “never even seen a bloke’s winkle,” Marion’s got the Jonathan Ross speech impediment, lusting after “Wobin Hood.” Just like Prince Charming in Sinderella, Robin’s got a massive cock that he keeps mentioning, and if Jim’s not got a crippling cuckold fetish, he certainly writes pantos like he has. Robin and Marion fall in love at first sight, with Robin feeling “all hot and sweaty and out of breath, as if Vanessa Feltz was sitting on my face.” Also, Marion’s affected bimbo voice is so shrill, when she calls to Robin, the dog I’m looking after suddenly lurches awake and turns its head to the screen like a squirrel’s gotten in.

When Jim struts on for his big entrance, he’s aiming for the classic panto baddie, but accompanied by a half-dressed woman young enough to be his daughter, feels more like Wayne Lineker with his fist hovering over an unwatched drink. The many scenes of Jim being touched by lingerie-clad twentysomethings are never not uncomfortable, as fantasy fulfilment where he’s got a “pussy patrol” of 17 young prostitutes — “one more and I’d have a golf course.” At no point do you forget this ‘panto’ is just the cobbled-together views and hang-ups of Jim Davidson, like when going into his fantasy of “two women together, right lads?!” which gets a horrible cheer. “One doing the ironing, one doing the washing up,” he says, grimly muttering “fucking things they are,” as the laughter dies down.

Though there’s less audience interaction this time, we still get some classic crowd work, like Jim asking a lady in the front row “have you got any knickers on, or is that a crack in the chair?” He accuses the audience of being pikeys, and singles out an old woman — “look at the fucking state of Joyce.” While gags often fail to land, there’s always a big reaction to his comments on the opposite sex, with blokes hooting in their seats at Jim’s ideal woman having “two tits and a pulse,” and braying when the concubines exit, at the charming observation, “look at that arse, children, it’s a shame to shit through that, isn’t it?” It feels like a political rally for men whose Page-3-stiffened dicks steadfastly refuse to deflate, in a world where half the population’s cruelly taunting them by owning a fanny. Most confusing heckle is a lone female voice from the balcony, with a yell of “I love your willy!”

There are a couple of returnees from Sinders. The Ugly Sister’s playing Jim’s manservant, Piles, and we’re reunited with the big, black dildo Charlie Drake gave to his daughter. In a scene that simply goes on forever, Marion naively confuses it for “a stick of wock… shall I lick it, boys and girls?!” The bloody thing’s wobbling about for ages as they run through endless jokes, like boys who found it in a ditch on the way home from school, and chased each other round the newsagents with it. The dildo returns later for Jim to suggest giving it to a “rug-muncher,” and identifying it as “a genuine Linford,” holding it to his crotch as he breaks into the Chalkie voice.

Barring the ‘black cocks are massive’ stuff, and a single word spoken as Chalkie, Boobs is surprisingly light on racism. But don’t worry, Jim’s not gone all Politically Correct; his targets are simply more keenly honed this time; more… completely fixated, in a way that’s so utterly relentless, it seems like a cry for help from a man with a life-long identity crisis, and riddled by self-loathing. First warning sign is when the supporting cast start riverdancing, and he announces “and here comes Flatley, the f*ggot,” sucking in his cheeks and mincing across the stage. Then we meet the Merry Men — “come on in, you big, tough, lusty lads!”

And so, of course, they mince on doing a ‘gay’ walk, one hand on their wiggling hips, the other swinging and snapping, each with a flower in their hair, to launch into, what turns out to be, Boobs in the Wood‘s anthem, The Shirtlifter’s Song. Performed in a lisping hate-crime of a voice, it’s likely Jim likely considers this his magnum opus, cramming an astonishing amount of homophobia into its 2 ½ minutes, with lines about “bending over backwards,” and “gaily chasing little dears.” Nobody’s put as much thought into how the gays spend their time as Jim — they “like games upon the green, playing pass the Vaseline,” and “if you call round tonight for a snack, Jack, put some Preparation H in your knapsack!” He’s got more homophobic slurs than he has ex-wives who divorced him for domestic violence, packing the lyrics with words like bent, nancy, f*ggot, Mary, and in something that’s not been said since the 1930s by a blustering colonel, “woolly-woofters.”

The Merry Men, promising to behave lest Robin confiscates their Judy Garland albums, introduce themselves as Scarlett Willy, Little John Thomas; who’s black, and consequently got a big nob — “It’s about 2 inches… off the floor!” — and Alan A’Dale, “the menstrual minstrel.” As Jim considers gay men to be women, I guess he thinks they menstruate too? You know that cliché about pulling the pigtails of a girl you fancy? I’m not saying Jim’s projecting, but he devotes an awful lot of time to slagging off the gays, for all their effete waddling about the place, calling out “hello, sailor!” and going into the bushes. There’s so much of it, you forget this is supposed to be a Christmas pantomime, and it’s almost impossible to excavate the shreds of plot buried underneath the avalanche of lines about arse-sex, stiffies, and lovely big wobbly knockers.

As far as I can make out, Jim’s plotting to kill his niece and nephew, to inherent their fortune, except the children have already been killed and replaced by Kenny Baker and his mate; another little person, and sadly not Anthony Daniels. Consequently the pair are pretending to be, and dressed like children; foul-mouthed, sex-crazed children. Tee hee. There’s something very late 90’s about seeing a blue Baker, bang in that period old kids show celebs would milk their now-grown audiences by doing ‘adult’ shows for university freshers, to guffaw at Cuddles the Monkey saying fuck, or Timmy Mallett getting his perineum out. Kenny makes a beeline to Marion, lifting her skirt straight up in the air. “I’m just checkin’ out the old Jack and Danny,” says R2-D2. Kenny’s “the big time bopper with the two-inch chopper,” and as Marion leads the ‘children’ offstage, hand in hand, he remarks “what a pair of tits!”

It makes you glad they never subtitled R2’s childlike beeps and boops, when a bog-mouthed Kenny Baker’s prattling on about jugs and spunk, and the sight of him struggling to run offstage “for a bit of oral sex,” all excited about getting his nob sucked, is the most depressing exit behind a curtain since my child’s cremation. As we’ve seen with this year’s Christmas content, there’s nothing comics find funnier in December than little people, especially when they’re swearing, smoking, or being horny. Because they’re basically kids, aren’t they? If they were adults, surely they’d be taller! As a result, their role is very much “ha ha, he’s smoking and said fuck,” with Baker’s cohort, Moose, dragging a blow-up doll behind him, which Jim turns upside down, shaking all the cum out of its mouth. Merry Christmas! And if you wanted to see an elderly Kenny Baker pretending to have a tommy tank, your wish is granted, when Jim reads him a mucky bedtime story. Incidentally, it’s about a flea who lands on a naked lady who’s asleep with her legs wide open, falling down a big hole and finding a dark cave with a funny smell, in another example of Jim Davidson being both obsessed with and disgusted by women’s bodies.

Like Jim Davidson’s badly-bruised penis when he was writing it, the musical numbers keep coming. Marion gets a love ballad where drops the screeching thicko voice to showcase her actual vocal training, though it’s about being “wogered by hundreds of men.” This is later reprised by Jim, doing an Elvis and using the dildo as a mic. Robin has a country music solo about what’ll happen if he doesn’t shag Marion; “I’ll have to start wanking again.” The lyrics are straight out of my school jotter, with such Ivor Novello contenders as “each time I miss her, I just pull my pisser,” “all your problems will mend, when you shine your bell-end,” and the emotive climax “it really feels great, when you ee-jac-u-laaaate!” followed by the sound of loads of sticky spunk gushing out the end of his great big prick and flooding his tunic. Robin and Marion get a duet at the close of act one, which finishes with both of them loudly farting before they kiss, kicking off an interval where the queue to angrily wank off straight into the urinals must’ve been a mile long.

Jim often finds a way to crowbar his politics in, and things get well Brexity when he comes out waving a sword and yelling “I’ll die before I surrender to Europe!” I’ve gotten so used to the last few years of Farage-poisoned political discourse, I was surprised at the lack of response. If he did that bit now, moaning about Brussels and “these bloody stupid laws coming out that’s got nothing to do with England whatsoever,” his audience of salmon-coloured Joris Bohnson fanboys would carry him around the theatre on their shoulders. Although, it was all leading to a joke about Piles “sucking off a swan” and coughing up a fistful of feathers. There’s also a dig at the “bloody NHS,” and later, he suggests a bit of mime, “so the fucking leftie Labour leftie fucking Arts Council will give us £75,000 a year grant!” Go on, Jim lad, stick it to… the arts?

With no Charlie Drake about to keel over from alcohol poisoning, Boobs contains precious few bloopers. The only notable fuck-up is when Jim tests Piles’ aptitude by asking how many D’s are in Match of the Day. Piles proceeds to “dee dee-dee-dee” the theme, only, it’s nothing like the tune at all, earning a confused silence from the audience. “Imagine how much funnier if he’d got the fucking tune right,” says Jim, who’s earlier dig at Piles only turning up to two rehearsals in the last fortnight may have been true, unless this is brave Jim’s way of avoiding the commie BBC’s copyright Stasi. In another moment, Kenny Baker has trouble locating the nozzle of a piss-prop, muttering “hang on, I can’t find it,” though maybe this was a small penis joke. But he definitely fucks up a line when Jim accuses him of being a convict called (for fuck’s sake) Bruce Foreskin. “Bruce Foreskin? I’ve never heard of me!”

Boobs in the Wood‘s big set piece involves all of the characters disguising themselves as children for a classroom skit, in an obvious excuse for everyone to be dressed in school uniforms and pigtails. Incidentally, at what point did the once-ubiquitous St. Trinians schoolgirl fancy dress get dropped? Was it Savile? Yewtree? Even those School Disco club nights, so wildly popular in the early 2000s, have vanished, once everyone started to notice it all seemed a bit paedy. Anyway, regular teacher, Miss Spankem, has been replaced by Piles as ‘Mr. Shagnasty,’ who tells Kenny Baker to stand up, in a reprise of a joke last seen in the Les Dennis Christmas Laughter Show. Then Jim comes out, dressed like a schoolgirl, holding his crotch and doing a child-voice that makes me feel sick. “I’ve only been a girl five minutes, and already I’ve got thrush!”

The whole existence of this scene is for a running bit where one of the ‘children’ gets caned on the arse by Shagnasty, who gets her to bend right over, grossly pulling her skirt up over her underwear, to wolf whistles from the audience. On one caning, girl-voiced Jim says “moisten my gusset,” for anyone who needs help never masturbating ever again. At caning #4, he calls out “get the gusset to one side, teacher,” but in his real voice, which makes it so much worse, adding “so that’s where they’re starting the Channel Tunnel.” As the canings continue, the male characters are literally cumming with excitement. “So am I,” moans one of the girls, to a loud “eurgh!” from all the blokes, as there’s nothing more disgusting (and most likely, a fictional invention by those hairy feminists) as the female orgasm, right lads? “Fuckin’ rug-muncher,” spits Jim, to one of the biggest laughs of the night, with everyone losing it in a way that suggests it was unscripted.

But I have to confess, the classroom scene contained the one moment to evoke as much as a wry smile in me, with a blackboard in the background scrawled with the words NEIL’S NOB STINKS. I previously used almost the exact same graffiti in my own Wakehaven and love me a smelly dick joke, but tragically, like being caught smoking by your dad and made to puff the entire packet, as a much-noted enjoyer and purveyor of jokes about nobs and jizz, the sheer unending flood in Boobs in the Wood started to turn me off them altogether. And it’s not just the scale, but the quality.

“How big is your nob?”

“Four inches.”

“Four inches?!”

“Thick!”

If that’s not value enough, Jim improvises an extra punchline; “no wonder your girlfriends have got stretch marks round their mouths!” Piles talks endlessly about sex with animals, and walks offstage to the sound of farts, while every line, every gesture, gets dragged back to talk of a bubbling phallus. Fairy Dildo: “I hear things are afoot!” Jim: “Actually, it’s about eight inches.” Jim had been a working comic for 25 years by this point, and behold, the master: “He went to a premature ejaculation clinic last week.” “How is he?” “Touch and go!” The true nadir of cock-based wordplay comes (haha, ‘cums’) with a kidnapped Marion screaming “I’m undone!” and Jim responding “you fucking will be undone in a minute” while feverishly trying to get his trousers off for a bit of the old rape. But as we learned with The Generation Game, he can work clean, with classic gags like “at school I was the teacher’s pet.. she used to keep me in a cage at the back of the class.” I must make special mention of the most bafflingly awful joke of the entire show, when the dwarves are tired from running through the woods.

“My breath’s coming in short pants.”

“And mine’s got turn-ups on.”

Perhaps Boobs‘ ‘greatest’ scene is when Jim hides inside a log to spy on the other characters. Marion and Robin’s talk of trying each other’s lollipops — “can I have a lick of your thingy?” — sets Jim furiously cranking his hog, if you’ve ever wondered what kind of moany noises he makes when he’s having sex. His cock pops out of a knothole, where it’s smashed with a hammer, and shoots a fountain of cum into the air. It’s then that a succession of characters march on to piss on the log — and him. “Where shall I have a wee wee, children?” they all ask; Friar Tuck, Piles, Kenny Baker and his mate; each dousing Jim in urine, with Piles spraying it into his own face, and shambling offstage licking it off his fingers. But it’s not just piss, as the Merry Men rush on to puke the bull-semen they drank in an earlier scene, before the latest in a long line of degradation fantasies ends with a cut to black, as Robin empties an arse-full of hot diarrhea over a cum, sick, and piss-soaked Jim Davidson.

The story draws to a close with Jim kidnapping Marion — “my boobied little bosomy wench” — and tying her to a throne of skulls in his dungeon. He sticks a dagger in her boob and orders Friar Tuck to marry them; but wouldn’t you know it, perpetually-stoned old Tuck accidentally marries Jim to Robin instead. Oh, what a gay old lark! Marion, realising “now I’ll never get shagged” drags Tuck offstage for a fuck, while Robin has a sudden moment of self-realisation, camply announcing “open the doors, dears, I’m comin’ out the closet!” Then it’s Piles’ turn — “So am I!” — and all the gays prance offstage, “a humping we will go, to a cottage we all know!”

In a stark future-vision of the turnout for his gigs in the coming millennium, our final moments see Jim left all alone. “Everyone’s gone off, namby-pamby, shirt-lifting.” He cuts the lights. “I have to face the facts that nobody loves me...” Cue Fairy Dildo — “oh yes, they do!” Until now, her presence was a mystery; with about two lines through the whole show, but then she strips down into lingerie. Most distressingly, Jim does too; stockings, bustier; the full Rocky Horror, and the pair have an extended and full-on kiss, as a disco ball shaped like a big cock and bollocks lowers from the ceiling, gets hard, then jizzes sparks. Again, I’m not suggesting this is wish fulfilment, but the big ending is Jim properly getting off with a scantily-clad girl half his age for a really long time.

Our curtain call features wildly extravagant costumes we never saw during the actual show, which feels like a tax dodge, including Spinetti dressed like Hell’s Pope, for one last run-through of the Shirtlifter’s Song. Everyone; Jim, Kenny Baker, Piles; they’re all doing the limp-wristed dance moves, as the audience claps along, joyously belting out lines about “joining the nancy clan” and getting bummed. As with Sinderella, the sheer bleakness of knowing real families definitely sat down to watch this after Christmas dinner has almost done me in. Queen’s Speech, Wallace and Gromit, then a wizened R2-D2 pretending to pull on his penis. Odds are, there’s someone out there who’d decided to use the yearly visit to their parents to come out to them. But then dad pulled out a video — “here, son, you’ll bloody love this!” — and they had to watch their old man bobbing up and down on the sofa, face red with laughter, doing all the movements to the Shirtlifter’s Song.

And about that. It’s not in the least bit catchy, but by sheer repetition alone, here in the woke future of 2020, the Shirtlifter’s Song has gotten stuck in the tubes of my brain like a poison, and I often catch myself humming it. I’ll be out dog-walking, minding my own business, and before you know it, my footsteps have formed a beat, and from under my breath, “a million woolly-woofters can’t be wrong!” Eventually, someone will overhear, and twenty years after his wretched, laughter-free, carpark flasher’s propaganda, poorly delivered by performers who’ll scrub it from their resumes, to an audience of Sun-readers straining wet-nobbed against their chinos, as I lay bleeding from the beating I’ll sorely deserve, Jim Davidson will have had the last laugh.

“…put your hand upon your hips, flap your wrist and purse your lips…”

…

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~ by Stuart on January 23, 2020.