Express & Star man finds out what it's like to be a panto dame - with pictures

And I turned to an expert for help. Ian Adams is Wolverhampton Grand Theatre's Widow Twankey in Aladdin this year.

I joined him as he sat in front of his mirror and was waiting to apply his make up for the first time that day.

"The cheeks, the nose, the lips and the eyebrows. It takes about 10 minutes sometimes," he said. With me it took half an hour. I made a lot of mistakes and realised very quickly that I was out of my depth.

Ian asked me whether I was allergic to Copydex PVA glue – because he uses it to stick his eyelashes on. I am not allergic, as far as I know. But to minimise the risk of me sealing my eyelids together, we used another kind of glue.

He said: "The thing is, if I didn't use it, the eyelashes would come off by scene two. They would sweat off."

The first thing Ian showed me to do was use a TV paint stick as the base for all the make-up to go onto. From then on, I struggled. I think I became over confident. I told Ian 'I quite like this. It's different from a day reporting in court'.

"Well, it can get quite addictive," he said.

Ian told me I had done well with the TV paint stick but since it was just rubbing it over my face, there was little to do wrong. "Now you need to powder it down. It just fixes it," he said.

This was where things started to go wrong. When the powder lined my collar because of my inability to control it. I knew being let loose with an eyebrow pencil would be a challenge.

He told me 'just make sure that it's all on – and then you brush it off' but the powder somehow found its way into my mouth and I knew I had made another error.

"OK, so eyebrows next," he said. "Everyone's got their own way of doing it. I used to do really thin eyebrows but now I do thicker ones because they look better."

As he painted his, Ian said: "Basically a dame maker is like a clown maker. You know how each clown has their own look? Everyone's got their own version of it."

He was right there. My lines were odd. Without my glasses on any lines were going to be somewhat hit and miss but once I'd finished both, one was noticeably thicker than the other.

Suddenly Ian was onto his eyeshadow

He took his blue shadow and gave me a small green container for mine.

As Ian helped me out, the call for actors to get ready went out around the theatre. The pantomime was going to start for the first time that day in about 30 minutes, I still had quite a lot to do. Ian put his eye liner on. He said: "If you pull it from there, your skin will be tauter. Yours will be anyway - you're young."

Next, red dabs were applied to the tip of my nose and cheek and then rubbed in to make my skin redder.

And then onto the eyelashes. That was the oddest of all. The weight of the lashes felt extremely strange.

For a first go it's a what, 5/10?, I asked. Ian did not rate my effort as he fixed places where I had gone wrong quickly. But he said: "What you will find is that the wig makes all the difference."

The green wig went on after it had been brushed. I changed into Joe McElderry's very warm Aladdin costume and the transformation was complete.

Joe joked on seeing me that I 'could have made an effort' and Lisa Riley laughed.

For all that went wrong, I really enjoyed it though I don't think the Grand will be on the phone anytime soon.