Costume drama

Senior features writer

Saturday 30 June 2012

Iam proud to say I've only worn fancy dress twice in my life.

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Barry Didcock

The first time was for a Silver Jubilee party in our village in 1977. My mum said she was going to turn me into a superhero which, from close reading of my Spider-Man comics, I knew required a bite from a radioactive arachnid. We lived near a nuclear power station, so I figured we probably had one catching radioactive flies in the downstairs loo.

We didn't. But it wouldn't have been needed if we had because my transformation into Jubilee-Man (who else?) was far less dramatic than I had been expecting. Mum simply plonked a balaclava on my head, gave me a belt and fashioned some kind of insignia out of red crepe paper and safety-pins. Ta-da!Fancy Dress Occasion Number Two was in 2010, for my son's birthday party. I went as a pirate and wore the same belt as in 1977. I enjoyed the experience more this time though, probably because I was drinking grog and not orange juice, and didn't have pants on outside my trousers.Beyond that, I'm a fancy dress refusenik. It's not that I don't like dressing up, it's just that I don't like dressing up as something I'm not and don't ever want to be. Like a vicar or a traffic warden. Or a Crusader, which seems to have been the costume of choice for England football fans at Euro 2012. They weren't alone, either: most countries had some fans wearing fancy dress. Those who simply riffed on their national costumes were laughable at worst but those who wore brightly coloured morph suits and jumped up and down while singing the White Stripes' Seven Nation Army were a little more disturbing. Expect more of the same at tomorrow night's final.What's even more curious than the urge to dress up, however, is the increasingly wide range of costume choices. Once upon a time, fancy dress was a language most nationalities could speak, in the sense that one country's coppers looks pretty much like another's. But glance through the bestseller lists of online fancy dress emporiums and you see there's now a dazzling array of culturally specific costume choices.One UK retailer has a subsection given over to Little Britain characters, and among the other people whose look you can mimic are Harry Hill, Andy Pandy (a 1960s and 1970s children's TV character, for any readers under 35) and those bushy-haired "athletes" from the 118 118 ads. I'd like to have seen England fans wandering around Ukraine wearing any of those outfits.So is there, I wonder, an enterprising Scot ready to add a Caledonian flavour to the world of fancy dress? I hope so. I'd love to see a stadium packed with 50,000 football fans dressed as Jack and Victor from Still Game. n

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Costume drama

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