Panto that's never a turkey

EXACTLY 20 years ago, The Comic Strip Presents broadcast an episode called 'The Yob'.

It was about a cocaine-snorting video-maker whose brain is accidentally swapped with an Arsenal-supporting bigot. Played by Keith Allen with a Jekyll And Hyde relish, the video-maker is hired to give a streetwise look to UB40, played by the band themselves. After scrawling graffiti, guzzling Tetley bitter and eating whelks, Allen's character racially abuses the band's black bass player, precipitating his fall from grace.

If ever they repeat it, take a close look at the fictional video shoot. In among the wind machines, dancing winos and tongue-in-cheek clichés of the late-Eighties music promo, you might just spot a gang of children crawling across the wasteland. They include one Lily Allen – who must have been all of three years old – brother Alfie, their stepsister Sarah Owen and best friend Ruby Platts-Mills.

"I've known Lily and Alfie since they were born," says Platts-Mills, who is now 28.

Owen and Platts-Mills grew up in that fashionable part of west London where everyone's a film producer, script writer or something in advertising. When they were young, they remember that every Christmas Keith Allen's brother Kevin and actress Anna Chancellor (Henrietta in Four Weddings And A Funeral) would put on an irreverent pantomime in a friend's front room. Unlike your average community Christmas show, this one starred the cream of British acting talent, including Stephen Fry, Ruby Wax and Keith Allen (pictured right with Lily).

Eventually the tradition faded, but Owen and Platts-Mills had too many good memories to let it lie. So in 2006, they revived the Portobello Panto with their own send-up of The Wizard Of Oz, featuring a pregnant Dorothy and a clutch of social stereotypes, and staged it in a community centre in Notting Hill. Making cameo appearance in Somewhere Over The Westway and in 2007's A Twisted Carol were the likes of Ray Winstone, Harry Enfield, David Gest, Lily Allen, Danny Dyer and Anneka Rice.

"We go round asking people to be in it," says Platts-Mills, daughter of film director Barney. "It's a much more friendly affair than going through their agents. And it's a friendly way for people to get to work with these big names and seeing them for the actors they really are."

According to Platts-Mills, the audience of the cult hit was no less glitzy. "Last year we had Salman Rushdie and Minnie Driver," she says. "And there was a rumour that Kate Moss came."

Flushed with their success, the two are widening their audience with a run for Somewhere Over The Westway on the Fringe – with the promise of mystery celebrity appearances. "We're not letting people know the dates," she says. "It's fun because half the time people think they've spotted a celebrity, but really it's just someone's brother. Fortunately, people enjoy the show just as much when there aren't celebrity cameos."

• Somewhere Over The Westway: Portobello Panto, Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, July 30-August 25

• portobellopanto.co.uk, www.gildedballoon.co.uk