Hold the front page….

But then we’re complicit in it: faced with the alternatives of a major, long-announced opening at Stratford-upon-Avon of the RSC Christmas show, Arabian Nights, directed by Dominic Cooke, the late arrival of the London premiere of an all-but-unseen Agatha Christie play A Daughter’s A Daughter, or even a Christmas variety show at the Royal Festival Hall Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas Cracker, most of my colleagues seemed to opt for seeing Anderson.

And the newspapers have been treating it with all the due reverence of a major event: the Daily Mail cleared the top two-thirds of page three for Quentin Letts’ appraisal, while The Times led with a big news story to accompany Benedict’s review, whose headline said it all: “Pamela Anderson pops out of the lamp and casts a spell on adoring dads”.

Also in attendance was Charles Spencer, who ominously declares in the Daily Telegraph that “My hunch is that she might become a panto fixture. I hope so because as well as supplying glamour, she proves unexpectedly likeable too, with a palpable sense of her own absurdity.” In today’s Standard, Henry Hitchings by saying sums it all up by saying, “She’s not exactly the beating heart of proceedings — she’s not on stage for very long — but there is no doubt whom the audience is there to see, and they see plenty.”

And she’s not in it for very long, either. She’s only in the show for the next two weeks, wedged in-between the turns of Ruby Wax, Anita Dobson and Paul O’Grady. And even if you do go, there’s a bit of a wait before she actually appears: not till 1 hour 5 minutes in, according to Letts. But, as The Times reports today, when she finally does, she instantly grants three wishes: “to her bank manager, the marketing department and the dads in the audience. The Baywatch star, 42, is believed to be earning about £50,000 for her two-shows-a-day, two-week run. Yet, despite the brevity of her appearance in the 2½-hour production, ticket sales have soared by 800 per cent — although children are being elbowed out of box office queues by their fathers.”

But at least it also sounds like she delivers, so maybe all the hype is justified. I am going tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll see for myself. Meanwhile, though I feel lucky to have dodged a few Christmas bullets this year elsewhere - like A Christmas Carol at the Arts, which got a one-star stinker from the Telegraph’s Dominic Cavendish that declared, “The biggest turkey of the festive season so far has landed at the Arts Theatre in a cheap, cheerful and thoroughly dreadful new musical version of A Christmas Carol that’s about as fun as swine-flu” - those same words could be used to describe the rubbish we sat through at the Royal Festival Hall last night in Sandi Toksvig’s Christmas Cracker.

What on paper (and interview, when I met the likeable Toksvig last week for a profile in the Sunday Express) seemed to be an intriguing effort to rewrite the rules of Christmas variety entertainment for the South Bank turned out to be a barely-rehearsed, badly conceived mismash of music, magic and supposed comedy. It didn’t make me smile once; and it beggars belief that they have the cheek to be charging up to £35 a ticket for this sorry mess.

Someone at the South Bank Centre - perhaps its artistic director Jude Kelly - should surely have spotted the turkey in the making and intervened to fix it or bin it. As it is, this miserable show is going to ruin many a family Christmas outing; and you can see for yourself, if you care to tune into Sky Arts 1 next Tuesday, when it will be broadcast simultaneously. By then, at least the running time - which clocked in at 3 hours 15 minutes last night - may have been cut. It’s not the only thing that needs to be fixed, though.