The Stage

Dave Peters

Published Friday 26 November 2010 at 08:33 by Richard Anthony Baker

For more than 50 years, Dave Peters was a stalwart of pantomime, in which he played a much-loved dame, and summer shows.

Born Peter Petrie on October 15, 1938, at Grangemouth on the Firth of Forth, he worked for a time for a pharmaceutical company after doing his national service. But he longed to break into show business. There was no evidence of theatrical talent in his family. His father was a lorry driver. But his mother bought him a piano, which he learned to play.

He made his theatrical debut in 1956 as a pianist, singer and dancer at the Little Theatre in Stirling, not far from his home. It was ten years before he began to be noticed, first as principal comic in a revue company at the Sunshine Camp at Hayling Island in Hampshire and then as an Ugly Sister in productions of Cinderella in such venues as the Essoldo, Scunthorpe, and the Arcadia, Llandudno.

Peters believed it should be obvious that a dame was a man dressed in women’s clothes. So his portrayal of this age-old character was very much in the butch tradition, similar to that of Les Dawson and, in a previous generation, Norman Evans. When there was no dame to play, he was able to take on the role of Idle Jack in Dick Whittington or Simple Simon in Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Muddles, the madcap jester, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Peters never achieved stardom, but he was immensely popular in towns he returned to again and again, most notably the North Wales resort of Rhyl, where he was repeatedly employed by the impresario Aubrey Phillips. He pursued his line of showbiz throughout a period that saw pantomimes running for fewer and fewer weeks and summer shows becoming more and more rare.

However, his adaptability proved to be one of his greatest strengths. He fitted easily into an old-time music hall bill, although one reviewer criticised him for telling jokes that were old as music hall itself. He was also an adept compere. The Stage once complimented him for “his flair for impromptu back-chat with the audience - exchanges that were often funnier than the scripted material”.

Strangely, for an entertainer who enjoyed the buzz of theatre, he was acknowledged by even his closest friends to be a very private man.

Dave Peters died in Bridlington in east Yorkshire on October 29, aged 72.