Panto legend Christopher Biggins promises sensational in Southampton

The show is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs running from December 9-31, with Christopher slipping into the role of Man in the Mirror: “I just love panto. What other show can you play and look out into the audience and see a mother with a newborn baby or grandads and grandmothers or aunties and uncles or brothers and sisters or nephews and nieces or whatever, the whole family, absolutely everyone there together, and believe me, that's very rare nowadays that you really can find an audience from four months through to 94 years or whatever. The adults are really seeing it through the children's eyes and there are going to be double entendres flying around everywhere. Actually, can you have triple entendres?

“But the fantastic thing about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs this year is that I am going to be flying in and out in the most wonderful costume. It will be just one main costume and one for the finale but I will be coming out looking like a mirror. I am telling people to come in sunglasses! I'm going to be absolutely radiant, just as I always am. Usually I have 16 to 18 costumes when I'm the dame because I think every time you come on you have to be different and because that's what the audiences want, and being a big man in those costumes that's what makes it hysterical for the audience but it's going to be very different with this one. And I've never done Snow White before! I am a virgin!

“The last time I was in a play at the Mayflower was the year after I won The Jungle.” Christopher was Winner & King of the Jungle in I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! in 2007: “And I just didn't think that I would get anywhere in that but then it went on and on and it was just so exciting. People ask me what the best thing I've ever done is in my whole career – and I'm so lucky I've had a phenomenal career – and I tell them it was being the King of the Jungle. And it was such a long time that we were waiting to find out who had won. We didn't know whether it was going to be a king of the jungle or a queen of the jungle, though I guess I could have been either! But it was so exciting!

“I think winning told me about what is real and that to do well in something like that you have to be real. People now come to me for advice about going into the jungle and I always say ‘Just be yourself.’ Don't start out by acting because you just can’t act for three weeks or whatever it is. If you try to act, then you are doomed. You have just got to be yourself and when I had to eat kangaroo’s penis I just said ‘Well, it's not the worst thing that I've ever had in my mouth!’”

Leading the cast of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will be Britain’s Got Talent winners Ashley Banjo & Diversity as Prince Ashley and The Palace Guards, plus Rachel Stanley as The Wicked Queen and Kirsty Ingram as Snow White.