OTHER members of the Herald reviewing cohort have more up-to-date panto experience (and one can be seen proving the point on STV's local Glasgow and Edinburgh channels at 6pm today and noon tomorrow), but I am sure denizens of a certain area on Glasgow's Southside still fondly recall the year – about four decades ago – when I gave my Ugly Sister in a hilarious Cinderella. I was the skinny, snippy one. Even more remarkably to me now, on another year – possibly the following one – myself and my song-writing partner in the first rock-n-roll group I hung out with were permitted to compose the entire score for the annual local pantomime, none of which I can remember bar my scarcely-original lyric for the baddie about "dreaming of a Black Christmas".

That may be why I have always retained a keen interest in the noise emanating from the pit, or wherever the band is located, at Scotland's Christmas shows. Like everyone else of my student generation, my main education of the fantastic possibilities of theatre came at the Citizens, and that included the annual Christmas show, which took elements of the panto tradition and combined it with proper storytelling to craft captivating shows for all the family (at a time when much of the rest of the work attracting attention at the Citz was controversially far from family-friendly). The "band" for a classic run of shows like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and the Jungle Book – written by Miles Rudge, directed by Giles Havergal, and designed by Kenny Miller, – was Derek Watson at the piano and percussionist Ruth Innes. She was a young freelance you might otherwise see as an extra with our national orchestra, but "Uncle Derek" – as he became for the run of the show – could also be seen onstage at the Citz under stage name Derwent Watson. A polymath of considerable accomplishment, Watson has written books about Bruckner, Liszt and Wagner and ran a bookshop in the Borders. And he composed the panto score, of course.

I was reminded of Uncle Derek this year at Perth's version of Alan McHugh's Dick McWhittington. The show's dame, Barrie Hunter (as Senga McScruff), not only kept up a flow of banter with "Uncle Stuart" – the musical director, Stuart Watson, himself a veteran of many Perth pantos and Pitlochry musicals – but also added some rather ostentatiously flashy bass guitar to elements of the score, which was funny from a man with false breasts and too much lipstick, but also added another ingredient to what was already a fine pit band.

But the Perth ensemble had to play second fiddle this year to the combo playing high up at the back of the stage for the revival of Scrooge! the Musical at Pitlochry Festival Theatre. If you want to know how much strength-in-depth there is in Scotland's current jazz squad, consider this: at the same time as both the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra and its youth wing, the Tommy Smith Youth Jazz Orchestra were giving Christmas concerts in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Scrooge! band included at least five musicians who could easily have been among the number: four of the horn players and bassist Mario Caribe. And behind the drums was Louis Abbott, a chap who is also the frontman of Admiral Fallow, an adventurous group whose latest intriguing collaboration is with go-ahead pocket-sized opera company, NOISE.

And there, for the benefit of any folk who still think that the panto season is child's play, I rest my case. Happy Christmas.