I am not sure what I find most annoying about the film High School Musical 3 - the fact that my five-year-old daughter can't stop singing the ghastly "You are the Music in Me" in a cod-American accent (having never, to my knowledge, seen any of the actual films); or the fact that the success of Disney's seemingly unstoppable bandwagon appears to have generated more self-consciously counter-intuitive beard-stroking than even that other assemblage of over-hyped gym-bunnies, Channel 4's Big Brother.

As it happens, I can live with the singing, although if she starts demanding blonde highlights and a Wild Cats tattoo I shall be less magnanimous. What really irritates me is the self-appointed position of liberal superiority from which this beard-stroking takes place - in particular, the trendy assertion that HSM is not, "as the middle classes might think", a perfectly harmless but rather annoying bit of cinematic bubblegum, but a musical movement in the fine tradition of Rodgers and Hammerstein and one that should, as such, be embraced suitably "knowingly".

I can offer no expert opinion about Rodgers and Hammerstein, nor indeed the status of HSM within the canon, but I do take exception to the implication that a bunch of grinning, star-jumping, shiny-haired teenagers with a seemingly irrepressible desire to set all their emotions to a fast-paced disco beat is too sophisticated/ironic a cultural concept for the middle classes to grasp. We know what it's about, OK? We fully comprehend all the pop-culture markers. It doesn't mean we have to like the damn thing.