How I continue to fool myself that you're actually interested in my half-formed thoughts about the clutch of shows that I've seen. But for now, gloriously, that is all I have to talk about here.

Billy was my date last Monday. I love the film. For me, it epitomises a good story. The underdog triumphs - against real adversity - in familiar, heart-rending and educational circumstances. And of course it tickles the frustrated ballerina in me. If father had been a miner, my life would have been very different.

What I think works quite so beautifully in the film is the juxtaposition of working class salt of the earth doing their best in pretty tough circumstances men with the rarefied world of ballet. I clearly hadn't paid close enough attention to what I was buying my tickets for - as I somehow omitted to see these two tiny tucked away at the end of the title words the musical. So when the band struck up with a fervent energy, I was rather taken aback. Working class salt of the earth doing their best in pretty tough circumstances men rarely - in my experience - burst into song in moments of high stress.

Putting that aside (Isobel), it was an impressive production. They must have thrown money at it. Billy's bed boosted out of the stage on demand on a hydraulic lift propelling him high above the kitchen. A bathroom rolled out of one of the wings. A bedroom out of the other. A social club span in and out of both sides of the stage as required. We had a fence of barbed wire for t'pit. We had a men disappearing into the mine with what appears in musicals to be the de rigeur head torch in the dark sequence. We had rows of policemen with shields. Packs of tiny tutu'd ballerinas pranking about. A whole band of miners who rioted when required. At the climax of the first act, Billy flew. I watched it all unfold with jealous pound signs flashing in my eyes.

The story was as the story is, by and large. The irreverence which most upset me was the replacement (not chronologically) of Adam Cooper in his boy Swan Lake costume with a camp parody of a boy ballet dancer doing a camp parody of a Glasgow accent that theoretically served the same purpose. But as he was dressed in an embroidered tunic and tights, it didn't quite. I disliked also the ridiculous dance number between Billy, cross-dressing young friend and the wardrobe of women's clothes which miraculously came to life and swung about the stage. But this is Scroogey of me.

The moment of greatest ruin came at the curtain call. The play - sorry, musical - winds to its dramatic climax. The strike is broken, Billy gets into ballet school, he leaves his family stranded and abandoned on the quayside and sets sail for London. The story stops. Blackout. And then the lights. The cast rush on and break into a dreadful song with a be whoever you want to be message and - for it gets worse - the miners, fresh back on stage in their orange boiler suits - start (I know my hyphens are all over the place but I'm enraged) struggling into tutus! So you have this packed stage of people and by the close of the hideous song, all and sundry, even god knows how old Billy's gran, are adorned - over their day wear - in tutus. The actors looked as comfortable as my CCC cast during their elongated curtain call. It was a travesty.

All that aside, I loved it.