With its camp badinage, heroes and heroines, glittery sparkle and hissable villains – dependably waspish Craig Revel Horwood being the prime example – Strictly Come Dancing resembles a close cousin of panto. So it’s no great surprise that many of its best-known faces make the lucrative migration to panto-land come mid-winter.

Recent years have seen panto debuts from professional dancer Katya Jones and 2016 winner Ore Oduba. Oddly enough, dancer Robin Windsor had to step into the shoes of another Strictly winner, Kelvin Fletcher, in a 2019 production of Aladdin. Horwood has almost become an annual fixture, currently the Wicked Stepmother in a Southampton Cinderella. But now, in another Cinders, in south-west London, professional dancer turned regular judge Anton Du Beke is trying his luck as Buttons.

Our turn to be the judges! How many points does he warrant? I’d say an enthusiastic but qualified 7. This is no walk-on part. Part and parcel of life at Hardup Hall, and Cinders’s unrequited devotee, Buttons is an essential bridge between the stage-world and audience, keeping things light on their feet, and the stalls alive with the sound of participation. Alan McHugh’s script gives him as many anodyne pleasantries as gags. “I bet you’re glad to be back in pantoland. What a time we’ve had,” he blathers at the start, with a winning smile. “We’re so skint,” he explains, “we have to hang the tea bags out to dry” – a statement slightly undercut by his elegant blue doublet and hose.

I have to say that Du Beke almost convinces more as a children’s entertainer than dancing pro. He peppers his patter with the odd pirouette, and in the second act, does a nimble but hardly earth-shattering top hat and tails number. But he hits his stride in a challenging bit of comic business that requires him to lip-sync and tailor his actions to bursts of pop songs, in this case regaling us with a run-through of a disastrous date – wiggling his butt to I Like to Move It and clutching his upset stomach to Let It Go.