But there follows an inspired fantasia on playing the spoons Mr P’s the virtuoso here and

But there follows an inspired fantasia on playing the spoons (Mr P’s the virtuoso here), and a long-extended number involving a microphone cable, which climaxes in Mr P getting his shoelace tied into the wiring and plucking the overstretched mike cord to perform a wild cover of “Fever”. Rare exponents of the true spirit of vaudeville, BP Zoom’s ability to provide an hour’s worth of gentle hysterics makes them worth two weeks on pure oxygen at a health farm.English National Ballet could have done with a shot of that laughing gas in their Cinderella, which rounded off their season at the Coliseum last week. Michael Corder’s choreography strives for humour but misses by a mile. And there’s nothing more depressing than feeling sorry for performers who are trying too hard. The mistake was in writing the two step-sisters as ballerina roles rather than pantomime dames, as Ashton did so winningly in his version for the Royal Ballet. Corder struggles against the odds to create character using extravagant show-off steps, but the pair’s flouncing and grimacing cannot disguise the fact that the classical dance is an art of refinement that doesn’t readily admit vulgarity.Unfortunately, the sisters’ rival antics are the main source of liveliness in ENB’s production Cinderella herself is a cardboard cut-out.

Though Larissa Ponomarenko was as fleet and proficient as you’d expect from a Leningrad-trained soloist, her acting didn’t extend beyond looking fragile and sad. Perhaps Sylvie Guillem can one day be persuaded to give a masterclass on how to deliver the kind of full-fleshed, detailed character which makes the most fiendish steps look part and parcel of her thoughts. Her Juliet in MacMillan’s ballet, revived for the umpteenth time by the Royal Ballet, sets a benchmark for all time. Who else can make Juliet’s first airborne pas de deux with Romeo look as if she’s never done it before? Nearly giggling with amazement, you can almost hear her saying “Oh wow!”Mime Festival: various venues (0171 637 5661), to Sunday 24 January..

Last Thursday, Radio 4’s Today programme reported that the relationship between a couple in Russia has been screwed up by television Before they got a telly, they were happy Now they can’t stand the sight of each other. He hangs around all day watching TV, and she keeps going absolutely ape about it, and the fact that they are orang-utans is, in a way, neither here nor there. The inference was that television can make families, whatever their breed or creed, hopelessly dysfunctional. After all, as the delinquent Bart Simpson said to Homer, “the TV has done more to raise me than you ever have.”

Now consider another example of television’s assault on domestic harmony, involving another famously animated pair, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnegan. Their most recent major row, they admitted to the Independent last week, concerned what their children should be allowed to watch on the box.

They didn’t identify the bone of contention, and I have an irresistible image of Judy screaming, “I’m not having those kids slobbing around in front of daytime telly every sodding morning!” But whatever programme the row was about, the message is again clear. If television can drive a wedge between Richard and Judy, for God’s sake, then what hope the rest of us?
Even in my own front room, normally a sanctuary of calm, there was a tense moment last week when I insisted on watching Mersey Blues rather than George Clooney, who was saving a baby by performing an emergency tracheotomy with an old paper-clip, or something similarly heroic, in an episode of ER unsurprisingly voted the viewers’ all-time favourite. For purely professional reasons, I am Master of the Zapper in our house. And so my wife went Clooney-less, glancing up from her crossword only to mutter sulkily, “Haven’t we seen this before?”I knew what she meant. A few months ago, in ITV’s Liverpool One, we saw Merseyside detectives blowing an expensive surveillance operation On Wednesday, in Mersey Blues, same story exactly.

The difference is that Liverpool One is drama and Mersey Blues documentary, but you would barely know it, for the lines between TV genres are becoming increasingly blurred. Jerky camerawork, over-excited music, in-yer-face editing, effing and blinding – it could be documentary, or drama, or comedy, or current affairs. Hell, these days it could be Postman Pat.Programme-makers admit that they are blurring genres, but claim they are only doing so to satisfy audiences. In the first episode of the Casualty spin-off Holby City, for example, we saw the blood and gunge of a heart transplant that until quite recently would have been the strict preserve of# a post-watershed documentary.