WANSTEAD FLATS: Sarah clowns around

5:30pm Friday 29th February 2008

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AN opportunity to join Billy Smart's Circus while it is visiting town was not to be missed.

Since I'm so good at clowning around, I thought it would be a doddle - but oh how wrong I was.

My teacher, clown Chico Rico, 36, first set foot in the ring aged four in his native Mexico with his father and has also spent time as an acrobat.

"To be a clown you have to be very versatile. The difficult thing is to have talent but to make it funny too," he said.

There are several different types of clown and they have appeared in almost all known societies.

Each one creates an individual face and there is even a museum of clowning, where clowns achieve a kind of copyright on their design by painting an egg and preserving theirs forever.

Chico, whose make-up takes an hour on a good day, calls himself a "happy chappy clown".

He said: "To make people happy - that's the best payment anyone could ever have."

Despite a strong wind he deftly span a plastic plate on a stick, but when I tried the plate flew off.

Things went a little better with the juggling.

Mongolian foot juggler Uelun-Ulin, 28, showed me how to lie down on a padded bench and throw a giant ball around with my foot, or at least that was the idea.

No sooner had I tried to throw it in the air than it went spinning off in the other direction.

Aaerialiste Alina Eskina, from Moscow, had slightly more success with a giant open cube which I swung around me like a hula hoop - until it whacked me on the head.

Both women were also born into the profession and agreed they could not imagine doing anything else.

The circus has talent from all over the world, including acrobats from Kazakhstan, a fire performer from Holland, flying trapeze artists from America and an orchestra from Poland.

Billy Smarts was one of Britain's legendary circuses and played to capacity crowds of 5,000 until it split in 1971.

It reformed as an all-human circus several years ago and was granted the exclusive fairs licence to appear on Epping Forest land last year, after previous licensee, The Great British Circus, which boasts the largest collection of animals touring Britain, caused controversy and protests from animal rights campaigners.

* Billy Smart's Circus is performing twice a day on Wanstead Flats, at Lake House Road and Dames Road junction until Sunday. Call 0870 444 1505 or visit billy-smarts-circus.co.uk.