Howard Chadwick has graduated to the queen’s pudding of pantomime roles. After five years of playing assorted bumbling characters at Harrogate Theatre, he is starring as the dame, Sarah The Cook, in Dick Whittington.

“I’ve been Friar Tuck; Alderman Fitzwarren in Dick Whittington eight years ago; Mr Bumble in Jack And The Beanstalk; King Boris in Sleeping Beauty,” he recalls. “Then I was Horace the Huntsman in Snow White, which was three years ago.”

There followed a hiatus where he was absent from the Harrogate panto boards. “The Christmas before last I was playing the Emperor of China in Aladdin in Oldham, and I felt a bit like I was having an affair, being there rather than here, though I know the Oldham panto well because I live only 11 miles away,” he says.

“Then, last Christmas, I didn’t work, because I’d had a hip replacement, but the hip is now oiled and in working order again. I’m ready to go, ready to dance.”

Howard is enjoying his return to the Harrogate show. “I’ve done quite a lot of work at Oldham, but being away from Harrogate and accommodating another house style of performing, it’s like playing Rugby Union and then Rugby League: it’s the same shaped ball, but different rules.

“The first day I was in Oldham, I felt like I was betraying Harrogate but now they’ve welcomed me back.”

Howard set his return in motion by arranging to meet the Harrogate panto’s director, Phil Lowe, while he was appearing on tour in Derby in Hard Graft Theatre’s suspense thriller, Knife Edge.

“I knew that Phil was from Derby, so I met up and suggested that if there was anything for me in the panto, I’d love to come back, and he rang me a couple of weeks later to say, ‘I’d like you to think about a role over the weekend. I’d like you to play the dame!’.

“It was Friday and I said, ‘I don’t need a weekend to think about it; I’d be delighted to be an iconic frock-wearer’.

“But then you think about all the fantastic dames I’ve worked with, Alan McMahon, Steve Huison and Andy Cryer in Harrogate, and Fine Time Fontayne in Oldham, and you start thinking about how you’re going to play it.”

Invitation nevertheless accepted, Howard has settled into the role of Sarah The Cook. “You soon realise that the best way to do it is to let the role grow organically, to see how it plays out with the script in rehearsals. Hopefully, I’ve made her my own dame,” he says.

“I’ve been given some really stunning costumes by designer Helen Fownes-Davies, and just to put a frock on for the first time, you move in a different way. Putting a pair of false boobs on makes you hold yourself differently.”

The dame’s voice came to him during rehearsals.

“That was something I was keen not to take a decision on too early,” says Howard. “I know some people will give her quite a feminine voice, but I’ve just found it gradually, rather than thinking, ‘I’m doing a bloke in a frock’. So I settled on it having gone on a journey around various regions before coming up with a voice that works for me.

“You have to bear in mind that you’re doing 63 performances, so you have to find something that’s comfortable and I can sustain for that long, cutting through 496 voices sometimes in the auditorium.”

Plenty of vitamin C, Echinacea and eating and sleeping well should see him through the panto run in his dame debut, and he is of course rather younger than the dame he is playing. “I did think that the dame’s role would come when I was a little older but in actual fact I don’t think age matters. I’ve worked with younger dames,” says Howard.

“It’s not about playing an age but playing it as it’s written and she will age herself to the scenes she’s playing.”

• Dick Whittington runs at Harrogate Theatre until January 15 2011. Box office: 01423 502116