A family wants a pantomime to go to this winter and cannot work out what is playing anywhere near them. An amateur dramatic society needs to pin down a performance date before it collides with the group two towns over. A curious reader just wants to know why a British audience spends an evening shouting warnings at a man dressed as a dame. It's Behind You! sets itself up as the single place all three of them can start, under the flat and confident banner THE HOME OF PANTOMIME.
The claim is a bold one for what is, at heart, a labour-of-love resource site built by people who love the form. It's Behind You! gathers event listings, editorial writing, and archive material about pantomime into one place, and it aims squarely at the people who care: enthusiasts, historians, and anyone drawn to a tradition that most of the country only thinks about for six weeks around Christmas. The title itself is the joke and the mission in one, since the words are the exact thing an audience yells when the villain creeps up behind the hero.
Searching for outside opinion on It's Behind You! turns up almost nothing about the site. The name is shared by a Kathryn Foxfield young-adult novel and a 2020 horror film called Behind You, so a search for reviews pulls back Goodreads threads and Rotten Tomatoes pages that have nothing to do with the stage. No third-party ratings of the site were found at all.
Listed in a business directory, It's Behind You! would turn up with almost no independent trail behind it, and that absence is not really a mark against it. A niche pantomime archive was never going to gather Trustpilot scores, and the lack of a public verdict says more about the size of the audience than the quality of the work. It does mean a visitor has to judge It's Behind You! on its own contents, with no crowd of reviewers to lean on and no star rating to shortcut the decision.
Inside the home of pantomime
What It's Behind You! puts in front of a visitor is a spread of sections, each with a distinct job, held together by a homepage that carries a Last Updated notice and a Crossroads logo alongside the content.
The material falls fairly cleanly into two halves. One is practical, telling you what is on and when. The other is archival, tracing where the tradition came from and what it has produced over the years.
The Diary and the practical side of the tradition
The Diary is the section doing the most obvious work. It carries event listings and scheduling for pantomime shows, which is exactly what a would-be audience member or a performer arrives needing. Pantomime is scattered across village halls, regional theatres, and touring companies with no central box office, so a single, reasonably maintained diary of who is staging what, and where, has real practical worth. This is where It's Behind You! justifies its banner most convincingly, because a working listings page answers a question no general search engine answers cleanly.
A parent typing a town name into a search bar tends to get ticket resellers and half-dead links; a curated diary, kept by someone who follows the shows, is a different order of help.
Sitting beside it, the Articles section carries editorial pieces on pantomime topics for anyone who wants reading rather than just a set of dates. It gives It's Behind You! a magazine dimension on top of the calendar, and it is the part most likely to keep a casual browser clicking once the date they came for has been found.
The value of both hangs on one thing above all: freshness. A diary is only as good as its most recent update, and an events list that has quietly drifted out of date can do more harm than an empty page, because someone might plan an evening around a show that closed months ago. The homepage does display when the site was last touched, which at least lets a visitor decide for themselves whether It's Behind You! is being kept current or coasting on stale entries. That single detail is what makes or breaks a resource like this.
History, the Nigel archive, and photographs from the wings
The other half of It's Behind You! is where the affection for the subject really shows through. The History section holds background and archive material on pantomime, a form with a long and genuinely odd lineage that reaches back through music hall and further still. Pantomime Story Books gathers story-based resources, the actual tales the shows are built from, Cinderella and Aladdin and the rest, which makes a sensible companion to the historical writing. For a reader, this is the point where It's Behind You! stops being a diary and turns into something closer to a small library.
Two contributions stand out because the site is willing to name the people behind them. Nigel Pantomime History is a specialised area credited to a contributor called Nigel, a personal, expert-driven corner of the archive that reads like real accumulated knowledge instead of padding. From the Wings adds a further strand of content, with its photography credited to Joshua Knight. Attaching names to the work is a small thing that lands as honest. It's Behind You! is plainly assembled by identifiable enthusiasts, and that alone separates it from the anonymous content farms that clutter most niche subjects online.
On the practical business of getting in touch, the site keeps things sparse. The only visible route is an email address presented through an image link on the homepage, working much like a light contact form. There is no phone number, no postal address, and no dedicated Contact tab, so reaching the people behind It's Behind You! is possible but not signposted.
For a hobbyist archive that is largely forgivable, since the email covers the main need, though anyone hoping to submit a show for the diary or flag a correction has to look a little harder than they should to find the way to do it.
Weighed up honestly, the site is a specialist's resource doing a sincere job for a small and devoted crowd. It has clear practical value in The Diary, real depth in its History and its named archive sections, and a transparency, in crediting Nigel and Joshua Knight by name, that a lot of bigger operations skip. It also asks to be taken largely on trust, with no outside reviews to vouch for it and a contact route that sits quietly in the corner.
The calendar is what carries the whole enterprise: everything useful here rests on how recently the pages were refreshed, and a visitor relying on the diary should check that Last Updated notice before trusting a single listing on it.
