SAUCE used to be something you poured on your chips. Now it means hot spicy stuff you splosh all over a pantomime – the sort of panto you definitely do not want to take your mother-in-law to see.

Rude panto – we will call it RP for short – is turning into almost as much of a national institution as its (relatively) innocent Christmas version. Come mid-January and a tide of ho-ho raunchiness sweeps the nation's stages.

The king of RP is probably Stuart Saint, whose annual productions in the West End have warmed up London Januaries and bought a whole new significance to the warning: “He's behind you.”

But coming up fast behind Saint, professionally, is a young Essex actor/writer/director named Luke Coldham.

Luke, 27, is the man responsible for the adult panto The Only Way Is Dick at the Towngate, Theatre, Basildon.

Luke, from Thurrock, has built up a buoyant career as a jobbing actor. His forte is as a pantomime dame – an unusually young one.

Luke is also a writer whose non-panto work has been staged at the Edinburgh Festival and elsewhere. His eureka moment as a dramatist came when he hit on the idea of “adult panto with an Essex flavour.”

He wrote The Only Way Is Dick in odd spare moments. Then, when his stint as a dame in the 2016/17 season was finished, he staged it at the Thameside Theatre in Thurrock.

The Towngate management saw the show, and invited Luke and the cast to take the show to Basildon.

The theatre has cottoned on to a fact that is steadily dawning on the rest of theatreland – there is a vast appetite for panto with the sauce tap turned on full throttle. The Towngate's Dick is already almost sold out.

But this is something more than just a commercial exercise. Luke, along with his life and business partner Alice Fillary, 25, are evangelists for bawdy panto. They bring to RP a sense of mission that would make an old time revivalist meeting in the Bible Belt green with envy.

Referring to cast and audience alike, Alice says cheerily: “Everybody has got a dirty bone in their body, but some don't know it, yet. It is our role to help them find it.”

Luke's approach to writing and directing RP is simple, traditional, and in an odd way, rigorous. Cast and crew can muck around in the raunchy sense, but woe betide anyone who tampers with the time-honoured panto format.

To write and stage an adult panto, Luke explains, “you just take the familiar panto set up and dirty it up. Jokes that, in a family panto, might be a bit double entendre, become fully-fledged filthy. But the basic structure, that gets left intact.”

A good example of this tweaking process is found in the role played by Alice, which has been changed from the traditional Alice FitzWarren, into Alice FitsNicely. “It doesn't take a lot of effort to move from straight to bawdy,” says Luke.

In fact, trad panto and its rude spin-off have formed something of a partnership, or double-act, with one feeding off the other. Luke and the team have their fliers ready in theatre foyers over Christmas, as Luke puts it, “on the top shelf”.

He says: “Adults come to the Christmas show, they see the fliers, they think, 'Ooo, a dirty panto', I'll go for that, but not with the kids'.”

The team behind the show is made up of a bunch of long-time pals and fellow-performers. In at least a couple of cases, their real life back-stories are the stuff of drama in their own right.

Alice, beams star quality, as her award-winning performance in LTC's Gypsy demonstrated for all local theatregoers to see. She has been in TV and modelling since the age of 7, and trained in musical theatre on Broadway.

But at the age of 23, her career hit an abyss when she had two strokes. “I thought it was the end of my career on stage. I gave up and went into teaching.”

However, she has clawed her way back. “I kept pushing myself, bit by bit, always making the next job that bit more demanding.” She says that the atmosphere of adult panto, which almost defines the word vitality, is a “healthy” next step for her.

Also in the cast is singer Jordan Gray. Jordan paid his dues around the club circuit for ten years before he gained prominence on TV's The Voice, the first transgender performer ever to appear on the show. Jordan role, Fairy Hanny, gives another advance flavour of the show's way with words.

The bond between these cast-members, old friends and present lovers, is palpable and strong, along with their enthusiasm. “Knowing each other, and the way we work, does help a lot on stage,” says Jordan. “There is a sort of shorthand between us.”

There is also another way in which it helps, given the raunchy routines involved in adult panto. Alice says: “When you think of the [physical] positions that we have to get into with each other all through the show, it's just as well we know each other pretty well already.”

The Only Way Is Dick is at the Towngate Theatre, Basildon, from Jan 24 to Jan 28 2018. Nightly at 8pm, plus matinees on Jan 27 and 28 at 5pm. Box office: 01268 465 465 Suitable for age 18-plus only