Britain's Got Talent Star: Mama G Inspires People to Love Themselves

Jordan Green | WeINSPIRE Journalist

• Mama G is a pantomime dame, a cross-dressing theater performer, based in London, England.

• She went on season 15 of “Britain’s Got Talent” and made it to the semifinals doing musical performances with six other pantomime dames.

• Mama G has three published children’s books along with a full-length sing-along album that was released in February. 

Read Time – 9 minutes

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — For anyone not in the United Kingdom, pantomime is probably an unfamiliar word, and no, it is not a person with a white-painted face that pretends to be trapped in a box. A pantomime is a person who participates in theatrical entertainment based on nursery tales and rhymes. Within this category of pantomime, is the pantomime dame which is a female character played by a male in drag. Mama G is a modern pantomime dame that took the U.K. by storm when she and some of her fellow dames went on the most recent season of “Britain’s Got Talent.”

Mama G fell in love with pantomime when she was a child seeing the performances at the theater every year for Christmas. Her mother put her in theater lessons when she was young, and she never looked back. From there, she attended Rose Bruford College and eventually did a course in Texas studying American Theater. 

Mama G says, “The entire time, all I'd talked about was pantomime and my tutors would say, ‘What about Tennessee Williams? What about David Mamet? What about Arthur Miller?’ And I'd say, ‘What about pantomime?’”

Courtesy of Mama G.

After that, she went back to the U.K. and wrote to every pantomime company until she was accepted. She has now been professionally pantomiming for five years. 

Pantomime dames have existed in pantomime for over 200 years, so there was a lot of history that went into making her look. She also works with a designer to make all of her wonderful costumes come to life. She does note that fashion and dames don’t always work together because the costumes she wears for her shows are not things most people would wear for fun. 

During the pandemic, there was not a lot of room for pantomimes to do their work because people were not allowed to interact with each other in large settings. So, Mama G took to Facebook as another way to connect with people all over the world. During this time, she came up with the idea to go on “Britain’s Got Talent” with a few other dames.

“Pantomime, as it exists in the UK, is pretty much our only unique theatrical tradition, and it's never been on ‘Britain's Got Talent,’ and it struck me as really odd that something that is in so uniquely British had never been represented in all like the 14 previous seasons,” Mama G says. 

So she got seven other dames together, and they went on season 15 of “Britain’s Got Talent” where they made it to the semi-final.

Outside of her efforts on “Britain’s Got Talent,” Mama G performs for families year-round despite pantomime being a Christmas tradition. She reads stories and sings songs at libraries, zoos, schools, museums, and other locations. She also has a YouTube channel where she reads books and performs original songs. 

“The first song that I ever wrote that I can remember is actually my theme tune,” she says. “It's only about 25 seconds long, but I have people messaging me all the time telling me that they sometimes just go and find the video of me singing the theme tune for a bit of a serotonin boost because it's really upbeat and uplifting.”

Mama G also has three self-published books. “The Rainbow Poem” is a poem explaining the different colors of the rainbow as assigned by Gilbert Baker when he first designed the pride flag.  “The Faries Fran and Vera” is a fictional tale about a boy named Billy who falls in love with another boy and the evil fairy Vera and the good fairy Fran fight over whether that is okay or not. The last story “Dick Whittington” is about an LGBT asylum seeker in London who ends up finding his chosen family. This story also donates proceeds to Rainbow Migration which is a charity that looks after LGBT people seeking asylum in the U.K.

In the next year, Mama G is producing two pantomimes. She is doing “Sleeping Beauty” at Easter and another yet-to-be-announced performance at Christmas. Along with these pantomimes, she is hoping to get published by an actual publishing house. She also hopes to produce another album to complement the one she released this year, “Mama G’s Story Time Storybook.”

One of the biggest things Mama G emphasizes in all of her performances is that every person is meant to be there and that in itself should be celebrated. Therefore, she makes sure that she is someone that is bright, colorful, and themself no matter where she is performing. 

“Everybody deserves to see themselves in every walk of life because everybody exists in every walk of life, and I know that as a child, I didn't see myself represented very much at all,” Mama G says. 

Courtesy of Mama G.

Inclusion is another main focus of her performances. She says growing up, other people found themselves sooner than she did because compared to her, they were represented more in the media. 

“If we do show representation, include everyone in literature and on stage and screen, then everyone's gonna grow up understanding that they deserve to be here, and they deserve to be who they are, which means there's gonna be less to be angry about because everyone's going to respect each other,” Mama G says.

Whenever she is doubting her ability to uplift people, she thinks back to a performance early in her career. She had been performing in a tent at a festival. There was a gentleman in the back that, though he seemed upset with the performance, never left and stayed until the end and talked with her. Mama G asked him what he thought about the show, and he said he loved it but was angry because as a 36-year-old, it was his first time seeing himself in a story.

Mama G says, “I thought I never want anybody to get to 36 and see themselves in a story for the first time. So even if I'm doing a hard show, I know at least one child here is going to hear themself in a story, and they're not gonna waste the next 36 years wondering if they're valid.”

The very nature of her performances is about inclusivity and encouraging people to be proud of who they are, regardless of where they come from or what they do. About her performances, Mama G says, “I want people to walk away with their shoulders high, feeling proud, feeling positive, feeling like they can take on the world, and ultimately feeling like they just had a really fun time.”

@mamagstories Some story time cuteness! #storytime #singing #nurseryrhyme #sign #panto #dinosaur ♬ original sound - Mama G