The Rocky Horror Show - mk2 - Biggins

Well this time six of my friends decided to come along and watch the show, we bought the tickets to see Rocky in Southend very early so ended up with a group of seats in the 3rd row (with a massive student discount too!). A couple of weeks later another friend decided he wanted to come along and ended up with a lone seat in the front row - lucky bastard!

The theatre offered us a special discount if we ate at their restaurant, so all of us turned up at the theatre 2 hours early in full Rocky regalia. At the box office we came across a friendly, if odd chap, he was an elderly gentleman and approached us mumbling "Rocky Rocky", since most of us were dressed rather oddly we thought that he was just commenting on our costumes. Perhaps I should elaborate at this point; I was dressed like Janet in the floor show at the end of the film (including the makeup), one of my female friends had come dressed as Magenta, albeit she looked a little more like a stereotypical bar wench than a slutty french maid! The guys were dressed equally outlandishly, but I wont go into detail -yet!

It was quite odd sitting there in the very posh restaurant, surrounded by well dressed diners in what essentially amounted to the type of clothes a bad prostitute would wear. I say quite odd, because college formals have made most things seem standard fare by now... We of course all ordered the most expensive looking items on the menu, since the meal was a fixed price and being cheap *ahem* poor impoverished students, we took full advantage of that fact. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours in one another's company, catching up with what we missed during the summer and the usual slightly odd turn that all of our conversations inevitably end up as to everyone else! (One of my male friends, as usual, ate the remains of everyone else's meal - including my own; the corset rather restricted my appetite! Another male friend took offence to the way his trousers were sitting, and threatened to cut the offending parts off with a knife... Resulting in various mocking bets about what else he would accidentally remove, and talk of "peas and carrots" Oh dear... I don't really want to think about what caused that inappropriate analogy!)

Eventually we all filed into the main area of the theatre, and took our seats. My aforementioned "lucky bastard" friend, in the front row, dressed rather like a gigolo... Wearing black trousers, and a white, backless waistcoat, nothing more... The show began, Christopher Biggins was the narrator this time around, and dried rather marvellously, prompting laughs from the audience. Unfortunately he really buggered up the "Time Warp", coming on stage far too late, but was otherwise amusing. The audience in Southend, surprisingly, consisted mostly of people dressed in normal street wear. There were a few people in corsets and stockings but it was mostly a jeans and t-shirt group ...Including the front row. As a result, before the second half was over Christopher Biggins winked flirtatiously at my friend in the front row. Of course as soon as the interval arrived we all jokingly tried to persuade him to flirt back! And bought plenty of blue drinks from the foyer, still giggling at the thought (unpleasant though the mental image is!) of my friend and Biggins together.

Much to our surprise in the second half my friend blew a rather extravagant kiss at Biggins, which was reciprocated by a rather more chaste one from the man himself. All of our attention was now on the interaction between Biggins and my friend in the front row rather than the show itself... My friend called out "Biggins!", to many chuckles from the audience, and Biggins in turn shyly waved back. Apparently, although I failed to spot this my friend in turn waved "like the queen", a few more winks were shared.

By the end of the evening we were all convinced that my friend had stood up Christopher Biggins, who was bound to be waiting at the stage door... This is of course incredibly unlikely, Biggins being an old-hand at narrating The Rocky Horror Show obviously knew it was a bit of fun on both parties part but at the time it seemed very likely indeed!

As we were filing out of the theatre we bumped into the elderly gentleman again, who had been in the audience. He was wearing nothing but a pair of sparkly gold trunks...