Lots of stars have squeaky voices - but Joe Pasquale is the only one not to have been drawn by Walt Disney.

"This is my real voice - honest," he says as if being interfered with by a chicken strangler.

"When I'm on stage it goes an octave higher still.

"It never broke properly, you see. I sound like my mum."

That voice, though, is his life insurance. I squeak, therefore I am.

This Christmas, Joe's squawk will be the one most noticeable at the Alhambra Theatre - more so even than the starlings outside.

He has been booked to star in Peter Pan, the first pantomime to be staged there by Lionel Blair's production company. It's the fourth year in succession he has taken the role, moving to a different city each time. Opposite him, as before, will be the one-time Dirty Den, actor Leslie Grantham.

"In panto, the comics often don't get on with the actors and vice versa," says Pasquale. "But I've found in Leslie an actor who doesn't give a monkeys what I do on stage. What's more, I don't give a monkeys what he does and that's why we get on so well. It's almost a double act.

"It shouldn't work really, because he's a classically-trained actor and all I've done is work at Smithfields meat market."

The image of a Smithfields meat porter who sounds like Orville the Duck is hard to conjure - but Pasquale insists he didn't artificially lower his voice to suit his surroundings.

"I've spoken like this since I was six," he squeaks.

He did not, however, graduate directly from sides of beef to the mainstream of the entertainment business. In between were stints in a margarine factory, as a civil servant, and, crucially, as a Butlin's Redcoat.

"That's a tough job," he says. "In an 18-hour day, you do everything from refereeing the wrestling to helping old ladies find their false teeth." That's showbusiness.

Pantomime requires a similar commitment. "You have to put everything into it - and if you didn't like it, you couldn't do it.

"You do perhaps three shows a day to a theatre full of screaming kids, and if you don't put your all into it, they won't either."

Pasquale comes from the end-of-the-pier, working men's club school of stand-up. He is an infectious comedian, unable to resist the temptation to rattle off a one-liner to any passing punter.

"MFI merged with Tesco last week. I bought a chicken from them and a leg fell off," he chirps at a party booker as we chat in the Alhambra's bar. "When I'd finished dinner there was a little bit left over," he adds, as if anxious to give value for money.

With two LWT specials recently under his belt, he's managed to buck television's trend away from his type of comedy.

"People say variety's dead, but just look at any regional theatre and you'll see it's not," he says.

"In London they think that just because they don't go and watch those kind of shows, they're not there. But there is an audience for them, obviously."

Home for Pasquale is Essex. The nucleus of his family life is not, however, his wife or his children - but his computer.

"I like the internet. I'm a major computer buff," he says with a boyish relish belying his 36 years.

"I bought one two years ago. I didn't even know how to turn it on, and no-one tells you, so I had to work it out for myself.

"For the first six months I was scared of it. But when you get on to the Internet, it opens up a new world completely. I was talking to a bloke in Iceland the other day." He doesn't specify whether this was the country or the freezer centre.

He enthuses about his hobby with a Tony Hancock-like zeal, but his tone turns quickly to self-mockery.

"My trouble is, I get stuck upstairs for so long that the family wants to know what the hell I'm up to."

If he can be prised down, his family will join Grantham's for Christmas dinner this year, but Pasquale seems incapable of looking much further ahead.

"We've got a TV few projects on the go," he says, with a vagueness typical of someone waiting for a television company to make a decision.

"Not worth thinking about, not yet. Never look ahead further than this weekend - that's my motto."

l Peter Pan is at the Alhambra until February 7. For booking information, call 01274 752000.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.