The leading lady never recovered

THE proposal, now withdrawn, of the schools authority in Edinburgh to petition parents before allowing video cameras into school plays and carol concerts has, as was easily predictable, been condemned as "political correctness gone mad".

Now, as a lifelong collector of Robertson’s golliwogs, I am not a fan of political correctness, but, as a practising thespian, I think the measure has some merit. For some years now, the Peebles Showboaters’ junior division, the Perky Elves, has presented a Christmas "spectacular" (the inverted commas are a requirement of consumer law). The tradition was launched in 1979, when the acting minister, the Slightly Reverend Maurice Browning, decided that the way for the church to arrest declining attendances was to offer discotheques, table tennis, and evenings of Scottish folk song.

The plan was a partial success - the table tennis team lost 21-3 to Nunraw Abbey Reserves in the second round of the Southern Scotland Comparative Religions Ping-Pong Play-offs - and might have worked if Mr Browning had not been exposed by the investigations unit of the Peebles Times-Picayune as a "professional con monster". In a report which was entered for the Pulitzer Prize by the executive editor, Mr Roger Pate-Balding, of the Greenlaw Pate-Baldings, the paper revealed that far from being slightly reverend, the charismatic Mr Browning was, in fact, a trainee potato merchant from Prestonpans. Under the headline "Trendy Minister Wore Tattie Sack: Career Now Ashes", the Picayune speculated that Mr Browning had been inspired by the efforts of Mr Tam Paton, the former manager of the Bay City Rollers, who escaped the drudgery of a life in tubers by harnessing the desires of the young.

Mr Browning progressed to a life of public disgrace, eventually becoming the provost of a fading coastal resort in East Lothian, but his idea lived on in an annual Christmas show, specifically designed to appeal to disaffected youngsters. At first, these shows were a little too obvious in their intentions. The first - Eating Chips in the Bus Stop Will Drive You To Hell: a Punk Opera - was witnessed by an audience of 27 in its one-week run at the Playmakers’ Pavilion, and was described as "hellish", "diabolical", and "beyond forgiveness", by the theatre critic of the Times-Picayune, Rear Admiral Mervyn Swinton, of Swinton.

Sadly, the review was printed after the show had closed, and could not affect box-office receipts. It did, however, cause an upsurge in membership applications, and the company was joined by a new director of theatre, Mr Leslie Camperton (who later played a murdered florist in the short-lived ITV series The Gay Hussars). Until his operation and his subsequent life as a sub-postmistress, Mr Camperton was a theatrical genius with an instinctive grasp of popular taste. His Christmas "spectaculars" - Naked Manger, No Room at the Holiday Inn, and Christ on a Bike: a BMX Musical - were sensational and educative, and led to a decline in the incidence of bus-stop harassment of up to 14 per cent on three consecutive nights, according to anecdotal estimates.

Unfortunately, Mr Camperton’s use of suggestive titles, and posters modelled on the cover art of penny dreadfuls, encouraged a certain portion of the audience to bring cameras to the performances, and whenever the leading lady, Ms Jessica Hardly (sister of the catalogue model Ms Virtue Hardly), appeared in her high heels and Speedo bikini, the hall was filled with whirrs and the unseemly flashing of camcorders and unfocused Instamatics.

The effect of this on the performance was quite awful. Ms Hardly, whose catwalk career had been scuppered by an unfortunate incident in which her lips became affixed to a frozen Toblerone, had a nervous reaction to the flashing of cameras, and her subsequent performances were jerky and episodic. Poor Mr Camperton said that it was like watching a newsreel of Miss Jean Harlow choking on a barley sugar.

Ms Hardly never recovered from her over-exposure and now runs a bed-and-breakfast near the nudist colony at Aberlady, and cameras and recording equipment of all kinds are banned from performances by the Showboaters and the Perky Elves.

It is, I think, a philosophical question. The theatre is best seen, and most happily remembered, without the aid of technology. Anything else is television, and is thus to be discouraged. In any case, souvenir photographs, taken by the former cruise photographer Mr Henri Lens, of Little France, are available in the foyer for the price of a box of Maltesers.

Kirk Elder is a senior citizen from Peebles. He once played a bucking bronco.