Companies and audiences certainly deserve to have more fun with their pantos, than is sometimes possible by endlessly recycling the same old titles.

Of course there's great virtue in the traditional stories - if well told. But take a look at many pantomime scripts at the start of this, our 21st century, and you might wonder whether Monty-Python, Blackadder, and the entire last 30 years of satire ever happened!

Can we seriously expect kids brought up on the wickedly sharp wit and observation of The Simpsons, or the dazzling, street-smart comedy of Pixar, to find the Listen With Mother humour which still prevails in many pantomime scripts, anything other than lame and risible?

Pantomime is not an obdurate and unalterable form, cast in stone by the prescription of some ancient and sacrosanct tradition. And tradition isn't about preserving something that's dead. The best traditions are bursting with life. They have meaning in the here and now. And yes - they evolve.

In fact, almost the only certain fact about pantomime is that it is a concoction. Its ingredients have included mumming, guising, burlesque, melodrama, circus, music hall, and almost every other form of 'low' comedy, in which the British have taken pleasure down the centuries.

In short, we made up an entire tradition as we went along, adding in bits and pieces from the theatrical traditions we took most delight in. A freewheeling history of evolution, addition and reinvention - until the middle of the Twentieth Century, when for some reason, pantomime became ossified as a Cherished British Idiosyncracy, and must now perforce, be viewed only through the rosy glow of nostalgia and left precisely as it is. Or so some people would have us believe.

The best modern pantomimes take the key elements of the 'tradition' - men dressed up as women, girls dressed up as boys, people dressed up as animals, magic and transformation, slapstick, corny gags, 'it's behind you', 'oh no it isn't', wholesale audience participation, the whole shooting match in fact - and graft onto these much-loved components, new stories and settings which provide some long overdue variety from an unchanging and indigestible diet of Aladdin, Cinderella, and Jack and the Beanstalk.

In many ways, the pantomimes shown on this website are in fact highly traditional - but moderated through a writing style which is bang up to date; snappy, often deliberately anachronistic, and contemporary.

Yes of course all this owes a great deal to TV and film comedy of the past 30 years - because that's what the author has grown up with. But it's worth remembering that it's what the audience has grown up with too! It's the standard and the style of comedy which people have come to enjoy and to expect. Trying to perpetuate the force-feeding of modern audiences with the genteel, artless fare which passed for comedy two or three generations ago, is a thankless task.

Yes, I know; a lot of people will resent this analysis - that's fine. Those intent on wheeling out Aladdin or Mother Goose for the umpty-umpth time, go right ahead. There are many hundreds of scripts out there for you.

But if you've been seeking a script which marries the best of traditional panto with novelty, energy, wit, and a little more contemporary appeal - then you've come to the right place.