Well if you ask me, and even if you don't, I think Making Whoopee has to be in with a shout.

If you're looking for a name for a festival devoted to promoting creativity in ageing – and Creative Scotland, Age Scotland and the Baring Foundation are doing just that – then let's please avoid anything too couthy, worthy, or conjuring up images of line dancing in silly hats.

The festival in October is part of the 2012 Year of Creativity, and, since, the, ahem, more mature citizen now makes up a fair whack of the population, they get to have their very own autumn fling with a tentative programme in which only breakdancing appears to have been screened out. Presumably with an eye to the insurance premiums.

This comes on the back of Glasgow hosting the eighth World Congress of Active Ageing which is due to be staged at the SECC in August, and where, judging by the promotional material, there would appear to be a not insignificant danger of pedestrians being menaced by low-flying abseilers in possession of most of their faculties and a valid bus pass.

Ageing has not so suddenly become, if hardly sexy, then certainly in receipt of a considerable makeover. The demographics are not new, but it's still a thought to contemplate Scotland having a 50% rise in its senior citizenship over the next 25 years with the proportion over 75 shooting up by a remarkable 82%.

What is changing, rather more subtly, are the attitudes being deployed in response to this major alteration in the population balance. We still have the lazy headline writers banging on about demographic time bombs and the service deliverers pondering the impact of significant increases in those for whom the community will have to care.

But there are three reasons why perceptions of ageing have changed, and changed in a relatively benign way.

One is in terms of employment. Last autumn the default retirement age for men and women was removed and, at about the same time, the department of work and pensions let it be known that a few years down the line the state pension would not kick in for workers at the age they might have planned.

The Chartered Institute for Personnel Development did a survey in 2010 which found that nearly two-thirds of workers over 55 expected still to be in employment beyond the traditional retirement age. Along with the Scottish Centre for Healthy Working Lives they've just published guidelines to help older workers stay healthy.

And health, of course, is a major component of contentment in the third age. Stay well and you're in the market for the increasingly large number of creative and sporting opportunities on offer to an age group which would once have settled for bowls and whist.

Indulge in these opportunities, in turn, and your physical and mental health will improve.

The second shift has to do with branding. A cohort of people portrayed as a problem are more likely to see themselves in the same negative light.

But increasingly, as more and more work is done on projected needs and public spending, the older population has been re-calibrated as an extremely useful resource.

While more of the elderly are likely to need care, it happens that most of the voluntary caring is also done by that age group. Saving, in the process, a small fortune.

The same goes for informal, affordable childcare. As its costs mount, and availability shrinks, more and more grandparents find themselves involuntarily cast in the role of not so temporary childminders.

And, thirdly, there has been the attitudinal swing in that age group itself. It may be that 60 is the new 40 only in the minds of the wilfully self-deluding, but it sure as hell is not the 60 your mother and grandmother knew. As a raft of travel operators will tell you, the grey pound is being invested in a remarkably diverse and adventurous form of global leisure. Spending the kids' inheritance has never been more popular or more imaginatively deployed.

Some sections of the consumer and service industries have been slow to pick up on this. The focus for advertisers and broadcasters has long been firmly fixed on the 16 to 24-year-old market on the not unreasonable grounds that you need to catch and grow tomorrow's customers.

But the statistics suggest that for the more fortunate sections of the older population there is no shortage of these grey pounds looking for a fun home. They have the money, motivation and time to go to films and theatres, they are likely to eat out more regularly than a couple whose social evenings have to factor in the cost of babysitters and they certainly haven't lost their appetite for big musical events.

(The number of air guitarists of a certain age at a Dylan or Stones concert would be frankly embarrassing if it wasn't so funny.)

The fashion and cosmetics industries have cottoned on to this rather more shrewdly of late, employing models who don't think Elvis's last name is Costello – or even that he was an RV in the movie Cars. But they've also clocked that section of the client base is looking for its own fashions rather than products casting them as refugees from the guild's big bake.

Broadcasting has been rather slower to appreciate that there is life above and beyond Ant and Dec, which in part accounts for the revitalisation of the radio audiences and the increasing evidence that the older segment of it no more wants easily digestible programming pap than it does bland food.

All of which has undoubtedly been reinforced by the advent of the baby booming generation on to the third age stage. This is a group which has led a relatively pampered life, which has expected its opinions to be respected and its choices to be varied.

Mouthy and still ambitious for a good life, you mess with them at your peril.