Christmas is around the corner, and that means it’s panto time.

Over the next couple of months, soap stars, reality TV celebs and local radio DJs will be in theatres around the country trying on glass slippers, climbing beanstalks, throwing custard pies and organising audience sing-alongs, all in the name of good, clean family entertainment.

There’s no other art form quite like pantomime, and it is quintessentially British, although some other countries where lots of Brits have emigrated also have panto.

In Australia it comes with celebrity stars and lots of gags. Americans see it more as traditional mime, very different from British panto, while in British Columbia in Canada they perform real panto using lots of local gossip and jokes.

Most towns and cities throughout the UK play host to a pantomime around the Christmas period in venues ranging from the top theatres to local village halls and community centres.

And whether it is a lavish professional performance or a local amateur dramatic production, they’ll be playing to packed houses.

So what’s in store for panto-lovers in our neck of the woods? Here’s a preview of some of the pantos being staged this Christmas.

The Alhambra, Bradford, has a strong national reputation for staging spectacular pantos, and the record box office figures are largely down to the appeal of one Billy Pearce, who is loved to pieces by audiences from toddlers to grans.

An Alhambra panto without Billy is as unthinkable as Christmas without mince pies, so it’s just as well that the Yorkshire funnyman is returning to tread the boards this year in Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs.

The show, billed as West Yorkshire’s biggest panto, starts today.

Sian Reeves, who played vicar’s stalker Sally Spode in Emmerdale, is playing the Wicked Queen opposite Bradford’s favourite funnyman, who plays Muddles. The show features new special effects, including the Wicked Queen’s enchanted mirror, which comes magically to life with the use of 3D.

Pantos in Leeds are already under way including Cinderella, now showing at the Carriageworks in Millennium Square, while Aladdin fills a stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Bah humbug! resounds around the Quarry Theatre, with its spine-tingling production of A Christmas Carol, which is perhaps more suited to children aged seven and over.

If you love Pinocchio – the story of the wooden boy who longs to be real – then the Leeds Grand Theatre has a production by Opera North which captures all the inventiveness and charm of the original 1880s production.

Some years you find the same panto appearing at several different theatres, but this time around there seems to be a wide choice, although Sleeping Beauty is on at both the Theatre Royal, Wakefield, and the Victoria Theatre, Halifax.

Harrogate Theatre is putting on the very traditional Dick Whittington, which was in fact the first panto ever to be put on at the theatre, back in 1900.

In Skipton, Daniel Defoe’s classic book Robinson Crusoe is transformed for the stage at the Mart Theatre. Packed with music and laughter, The Panto Company’s production is a delight for both children and adults.

So, there you have it – a plethora of pantos to amaze and delight family members from eight to 80. All you have to do is choose...