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When people pour out of the Hippo chattering excitedly and quite obviously well pleased, it's a sure sign the panto has come off with a bang.

And it's scarcely surprising. This year it is Jack and The Beanstalk, but whatever the name of the panto, the issue is always the same, namely does the show get the kind of treatment which puts bums on seats?

Happily, the answer is unequivocally in the affirmative, with a strong, well-seasoned cast of principals, good sets, attractive costumes and enough special effects to make you feel the whole thing was well worth the ticket money.

The magical beanstalk has now passed into panto mythology along with Daisy the panto cow (here called Moo).

When the late, great Arthur Askey played the Dame in Jack and the Beanstalk at the Alexandra Theatre, just across the road from the Hippo, he played a gloriously funny milking gag. After a lot of hilarious activity, all Daisy managed to produce was a bag of frozen peas, even Mark Wynter who played Jack, only just managed to avoid corpsing.

But this panto has my favourite droll Matt Slack, as Silly Billy, who runs through a whole gamut of routines.

At once innocently playful, naive, knowing and naughty. Mr Slack is a born performer, he sees a chink in our armour, touches our collective funny bone and sets the house on a roar, aided and abetted by Gary Wilmott as Dame Trot, no more a pantomime dame than Superman.

Mr Wilmott rushes about in various forms of fancy dress and comes into his own in the slapstick version of "A Partridge In A Pear Tree", where everyone comes up with an object of kind or another. As performed here, it was hilarious, and the best I've seen in years of panto reviewing.