Ninety-nine years ago the New Wimbledon Theatre opened with a pantomime and began to build a loyal following of local families with the customary mix of farce and eyebrow-raising innuendo.

This year the innuendo may not be necessary. Not even the lewdest double entendre from a pouting Widow Twankey could raise eyebrows quite as high as the announcement of one name on the cast list for this year’s production of Aladdin.

Bursting from the lamp on December 13 will be Pamela Anderson, the actress best known for appearing in very few clothes on the television series Baywatch and for appearing with nothing on at all in a leaked internet sex tape.

News of her arrival for a two-week stint — after which she will be replaced by the television presenter Paul O’Grady — has already had a salutary effect on ticket sales. On Thursday box-office takings increased by 800 per cent against the previous day.

Whether she will attract the same sort of audience that came to see Cinderella last year remains to be seen. A spokesman for the theatre said: “People will be coming to see a pantomime. They won’t be expecting anything else.”

Kevin Wood, the chief executive of First Family Entertainment, which is producing the show, described Anderson as “a wholesome, larger than life character”.

“What I would say is that ... I think dads will be more easily persuaded to come along this year,” he said.

He regards Anderson as “the best piece of casting that probably there has ever been in the world of pantomime”, in part because he believes pantomime “contains an element of nostalgia”.

“People often say to us, ‘This star is really hot right now’,” he said. “We say, ‘What our audiences want are people who played significant characters in iconic series: Starsky and Hutch, Baywatch, Dallas, Happy Days’.”

Mr Wood, a former stage director, switched to pantomime 35 years ago after comparing the takings of his production of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party in Stevenage with the pantomime of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that had preceded it.

He is now head of the second-largest pantomime production company in the UK. He is also mostly responsible for the introduction of American actors to the pantomime stage.

“Five years ago I had the challenge of finding sufficient numbers of actors,” he said. Pantomime shows had relied on Australian soap actors up until then, but Australian soaps were in decline.

“Most of the things people were watching on TV at that time were American,” he said. After a fruitless summer cold-calling American agents, he hired Woody Allen’s casting director to make the initial calls.

“She’s an Anglophile, loved pantomime,” he said. “Agents answer her calls because they think she’s about to offer their stars a part in the next Woody Allen film. But she says, ‘How about panto?’.”

Mr Wood made a DVD that explained the history of the art form and travelled to Los Angeles. “We met this little agent on some boulevard who said, ‘Ah, Dustin’s not available’. Then she said, ‘Ah, but Henry Winkler is’.”

Winkler, beloved by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic for his role as the Fonz in Happy Days, arrived to play Captain Hook at the New Wimbledon Theatre.

Upon his departure Mr Wood presented him with a silver hook mounted on a plinth. Winkler put it on his mantelpiece.

“He hosts a lot of Hollywood parties,” Mr Wood said. “Everyone sees it and asks him about it. He’s brought us a lot of new artists.”

Winkler has also served as an ambassador for pantomime in Hollywood. “With Pamela, I just said phone Henry,” Mr Wood said. “He always says, ‘You must do it.’.”

Winkler concurred. “I’ve always encouraged others to follow in my footsteps,” he said yesterday, adding that it was an “opportunity to engage with a different audience”. Last year that audience was in Milton Keynes; this year Liverpool.

Christopher Biggins, the grand dame of British pantomime, estimates that an American star can earn £25,000 a week during pantomime season. “I remember someone trying to get Joan Collins. She would have been a marvellous wicked queen. They couldn’t pay her enough money so she must have asked for a fortune.”

In years gone by there have been audible hisses from Biggins about sportsmen and reality TV celebrities venturing into pantomime but he has fewer reservations about American actors — “so long as they can act”. He added: “Sometimes I don’t think they know what they are letting themselves in for: two shows a day, six days a week.

“Henry Winkler is brilliant. I even think Pamela Anderson is acceptable. Though I would rather see Paul O’Grady, the genie must have two remarkable assets and she fills that genre very well.”

In a very real sense, he’s behind her.

Genie genealogy

•The genie as we know it popped out of the Islamic tradition of the Jinn, an order of supernatural beings created, according to the Koran, “from the smokeless flame of fire”

•A jinn or djinni appears to Aladdin in a story from the Arabian Nights. French translations used the word “genie” from the Latin “genius”, meaning guardian spirit. The lamp is rubbed and a being, monstrous and terrible, is released into the air, with a fierce face and fiery eyes

•The pantomime version transferred the story to China, though Disney brought it back to the Middle East for its 1992 animated film Aladdin. The first pantomime Aladdin was staged in Covent Garden in 1788 but the story from which most modern Aladdin pantomimes derive, Aladdin, or the Wonderful Scamp, was written by Henry Byron. It was performed at the Strand Theatre in 1861

•The story, in modern versions, tells of how the evil Abanazar seeks a magic lamp containing an all-powerful, wish-granting genie that can be retrieved only by a young boy pure of heart. The genie emerges for Aladdin with the words: “Master! Your wish is my command!”

•There is no firm rule in pantomime as to what the genie should look and sound like: Frank Bruno has been one and so has Patsy Kensit. Christopher Biggins, who has appeared in pantomime nearly every Christmas for the past 40 years, said: “It can be a glamorous woman, a large black man or anyone else, though glamour is an important aspect”

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