Millie week 5 pt 1, Oct 1-3 1990

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Twenty years ago the idea of the first window display of Christmas happening at the beginning of October was still an exaggeration. Now we're in an age of all year round hot cross buns and my coffee table is groaning under the weight of the Christmas catalogues that have already arrived. The Xmas puds sit arranged in serried rows in Sainsburys.

Can you guess what the big pop culture event of 1990 was? A few months later I was to share the comics page of the Daily Mirror with them...

The second cartoon heralds that Autumn's big storyline - one that if repeated nowadays would be considered a rip-off of Disney's High School Musical. Yes, Crippen comprehensive is doing a school play - and it's a self penned musical...

I'll admit it. I do musicals. I toured around Kent with the West Kent Youth Theatre while I was at school, doing shows like "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying" (Bud Frump) and "Cabaret" (Chorus - too much dancing and sex appeal required for a real part), so I know of what I speak here. I still appear in them now.

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Here's what I'm currently doing. In this case I'm in the chorus again, but that's mainly because The Sound of Music is like a compendium of everything I hate in musicals (sickly sentimentality, glutinous songs you hate but can't get out of your head, ponderous plotting, but thankfully no 'interpretive ballet' that lasts three hours), so I'm limiting my exposure to it. If you like the Sound of Music, come and see the show if you're around Hastings between the 19th and 22nd of October - Hastleons productions are always excellent. If you don't like the Sound of Music, then keep away - it's the Sound of Music.

My idea of a good musical? 'The Full Monty', 'How to Succeed..', 'City of Angels' - something with content as well as tunes, a sense of mischief, and with sentimentality kept to a minimum.