Dick Whittington, Grand Opera House, York, December 13 to January 6

AUSTRALIAN soap star Anne Charleston will be having more fun on her return to the Grand Opera House pantomime in York.

It was not that she did not enjoy herself playing the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella in 1993-94, alongside the likes of Emmerdale's Frazer Hines and Ronald Magill, former British tennis champ Annabel Croft and the two Shetland ponies who used to help themselves to the water cracker biscuits on her dressing room table. No, it is her change from goodie to baddie for a panto run that has already surpassed last year's ticket sales of 20,000.

In Dick Whittington, the soap queen formerly known as Madge from Neighbours will be playing Queen Rat. "I've done panto every year since 1988; this is my 14th and I haven't been the Fairy for a few years. I get to play the baddie now, and I prefer that!," says Anne, who began rehearsals in York on Tuesday for next Thursday's opening night. "I find baddies more interesting. They're more fun, and you get more reaction - and it's fun because you get to work with the audience."

There is, she suggests, an added pleasure in being a Queen Rat rather than a King Rat. "I think you can afford to be a little more two faced, a little more charming. When Ian Smith did King Rat, with me as the Fairy Godmother, in Hanley in 1992, he was dead evil but I'm not playing the Rat that way. My Queen Rat has charm and she's a bit of flibbertigibbet as well!" Anne says.

"I think it's essential in panto to bring your own character into it: you don't immerse yourself in the character you're playing as much as you do in a play or television series."

Anne was immersed in the role of Madge in Neighbours for 11 years in two separate stints in the Aussie soap. Her second run ended this spring when Madge died from pancreatic cancer, and Anne has no regrets about the final curtain falling on her best-known character.

"It was a fairly turgid end," she says, with candour. "I needed to go really. I'd had enough; they'd destroyed the character that I'd painstakingly built up in my first seven years. Five years later, it was a different production team, and I think they were misogynist. They turned Madge into a victim, which didn't please me.

"For various reasons, it had seemed like a good idea to go back, and it served its purpose for a few years but I didn't like how they treated the character. I always said that if they made her soapy, I wouldn't want to play her - but they made her exactly that so I decided to leave. For once, my timing in my life was spot on!"

The decision has, indeed, proved inspired. Anne has had a year to remember, not least doing two shows with Last Of The Summer Wine star Jean Fergusson, first in New Yorker John A Penzotti's play Five Blue-Haired Ladies Sitting On A Green Park Bench, at Lincoln Theatre Royal and now Dick Whittington, in which Jean plays Fairy Marina. A 16-week tour of Penzotti's play is already in place for next year.

Last spring, Anne undertook a tour of Noel Coward's Present Laughter, and in the autumn she returned to Australia for two months to record the lead role in Caroline Aherne's first work since leaving Britain and The Royle Family behind her. Caroline has written and directed Dossa And Joe, a new comedy set to run on the BBC in February.

"I'm playing an Irish character, Dossa, with Michael Caton as my husband Joe, and it's all about how his life and his relationship with his wife changes when he retires. When I looked at the script she seemed a typical put-upon Australian housewife, and then Caroline said 'How's your Irish accent?'."

Luckily, living in Galway, it was no problem for Anne.

Dick Whittington, Grand Opera House, York, December 13 to January 6. Tickets: £7.60 (children) to £13.50; family of four £34; ring 01904 671818