Now that panto season has arrived and the rest of the year is behind you (sorry, really sorry), a new exhibition celebrating decades of Scottish pantomime is in Edinburgh. Subtitled "Your Other National Theatre", it will visit five theatres in the north-east over the next two months and tour Glasgow and the west next year. The University of Glasgow exhibition features pictures, photographs, playbills and rarely-seen archive film footage of pantomimes.

I have loved panto and everything about it all my life, whether I was in the audience, the cast, the crew or the band. It is a multimedia, interactive entertainment that is incomparable to anything else in the arts. It is fable, philosophy, parable and satirical statement all one big, camp, colourful package. My love affair started at the age of five when my school went to see Scrooge at the Citizens' Theatre in 1976. The story was set at Partick Cross where Mr Scrooge owned a sweet shop. The power of the show was so strong I asked my mum if she would take me to that shop.

I cannot think of another art form or entertainment where the audience is so involved with what is going on. Here we have a reality onstage, a bizarre reality at that but a perceived reality none the less, which very easily coexists and interacts with our own reality - that of us sitting in an audience watching it all happen. We find it perfectly acceptable for Widow Twankee to come out of her nineteenth-century Shanghai laundry to ask the primary school pupils of Greater Glasgow and Sharon's 40th birthday night out: "What do you think, boys and girls? Should we steal the landlord's money?" And everyone gets it.

We will accept the celeb actors parodying themselves and their TV roles while still believing them to be Twankee, Buttons, Baron Hardup and the rest. We will accept that a genie in his lair in the mystical east can have a pop at Alex Salmond in his lair in the mystical east of Scotland. It is this propensity to just "go with it" that keeps me smiling and singing along all the way.

The satire involved can be very cutting and, to borrow a comedy phrase, "on". The cast have a tendency to adapt gags to new bits of news, sometimes even that day's news. Here's a short passage from a performance that I did as Wishee Washee with actor John Hannibal as Widow Twankee in Aladdin at Dunfermline Carnegie Hall just after Henry McLeish stepped down as First Minister and Jack McConnell aired his affairs before taking office:

Widow Twankey: (in tears) Oh, son, son.
Wishee Washee: Whit is it?
WT: That's us flung oot. Evictit! Where are we gonny live noo?
WW: Don't worry, Mammy. That nice Mr McLeish has got some places for rent up in Glen Rothes.
WT: Och, son, we canny afford that. I'll need a new job.
WW: I hear that Jack McConnell's looking for a new secretary.
WT: I applied, son, but he wisnae impressed by my shorthand.

Panto in Scotland, too, does not seem to have succumbed to the dumbing down of panto as in the south. You won't see the stars of Big Brother (much) or charismatic sportsmen on stage. You see actors. Acting. You see stories written by writers, not just something strung together around the usual summer season routine of the main stars.

The stories themselves are always on the same subject: the struggle between good and evil. We see good represented by a fairy godmother. Her representative on earth will be some impoverished soul with the kindest heart in the kingdom. Evil will be represented by a witch or a genie whose earthbound bidder is a greedy landlord or a sneaky wicked stepmother. Good = kindness; bad = greed. And, of course, good always wins out in the end, sending evil back from whence it came and saving the landlord from his corrupt ways, sometimes even marrying him off to the Dame.

And, of course, there's the Dame! You don't see so many traditional Dames these days, and fair enough. Men play men and women play women. While some may have thought this grotesque portrayal of women was offensive, I think they miss the point.

The reason the Dame is played by a man is to emphasise the grotesque nature of her character, just as the principal boy was played by a young woman to emphasise the gentle and sweet nature of the Prince's character. But we have accepted that these days male and female actors can be trusted to portray those characteristics under their own steam and talent.

But the Dame is still imperative to the panto experience. She is our portal, our mother and governess who will guide us through the black forest. And, oh, what Dames Scotland has had: Stanley Baxter, Denny Willis and Bob Carr, to name but a few.

Another channel for the audience is the character which has come to be known as "the daft boay", definitively played by Gerard Kelly every year at the Glasgow King's. His fear of the baddie, his unrequited love for the princess, his sudden burst of bravery when his mammy or the princess is in danger. These are all things that speak to us.

There are few art and entertainment forms that appeal to young and old, rich and poor, sophisticate and plebeian, intelligentsia and cognoscenti alike. The music, the dancing, the glitter, the laughs, the struggle, the triumph (and not forgetting the free sweets) all make for a unique and uncategorisable phenomenon of popular culture.

Like every year, I can't wait. Bring doon the cloot!

Pantomime in Scotland, to which visitors are invited to contribute their own memories and experiences, is currently at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, until Saturday (open daily from noon) and travels to Perth Theatre; The Byre, St Andrews; His Majesty's, Aberdeen; and Eden Court, Inverness.