LOOKING BACK: A Key part of the Peterborough story

I wonder what percentage of Peterborians have attended a show or other event there? I imagine a fair proportion of the city’s population have even been on the stage – from Key Kids to Gang Shows and from Telegraph award nights to am-dram productions.

The theatre is synonomous with panto and among the stars who have appeared was Paul Daniels who sadly died recently. The magician appeared in Sleeping Beauty in 2005. Top marks if you remember that year’s Key panto was actually held at the Broadway! It was a show written and directed by Michael Cross who for many years was much loved by city theatre-goers as the Dame in the panto.

Michael together with two previous directors – Tony Clayton and Derek Killeen – raised the theatre’s profile far higher than you might expect for a small provincial venue with fewer than 400 seats.

The then Peterborough City Council chief executive Paul Martin and Michael Cross are pictured with Derek Killeen at his leaving presentation at the Key Theatre.

The building opened 0n November 26, 1973 with a performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The theatre cost just £165,000 to build although within a few years it was in deep financial trouble. Thankfully it survived.

My own memory of The Key is interviewing Charlie Drake who played Buttons in the 1985 panto Cindrella. I was a cub reporter working for the Spalding Guardian. Charlie was my first big assignment. I was warned by the office grump that Charlie would eat me alive, but he was charming.

If you have any memories or photos of the Key please get in touch.

From the archives

Paul Daniels who appeared in the Key panto in 2005

A look back at stories from the Peterborough

Telegraph archives – some sad, some happy, some serious, some funny

Peterborough has some strange claims to fame from being home to the world’s first mini-roundabout (it was the junction between London Road and Oundle Road) and home to Black Shuck the mysterious dog which inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to pen The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Along side those you can file Mrs Ethel Grainger or as she was also known “wasp waist woman’’.

Tony Clayton, one of the influential directors of the Key Theatre.

Mrs Grainger, who lived in Priory Road, had the smallest waist in the world for a woman at just 13 ins.

Her death at the age of 76 was reported in the Peterborough ET on Friday, February 26, 1982.

Mrs Grainger was in the Guinness Book of Records and, the ET reported, “achieved her incredible waist measurement by wearing increasingly smaller made to measure steel corsets.’’

Her waist measurement was 22 inches when she married local teacher and keen amateur astronomer William Grainger.

Building work almost complete on the theatre

Mrs Grainger had previously told the ET that her husband thought her too chubby and it took her 21 years to get to her world record measurement.

She was also known for having many piercings – including 13 in one ear and wearing a large ring through her nose.

She was also, the ET obituary noted, a former president of the Peterborough Bee Keepers’ Society.

In 2011, the magazine Vogue Italia caused a storm in the fashion world when it featured a model with a tiny, corsetted waist on a cover inspired by Mrs Grainger.