Sylvia Patterson on teenage kicks

Back in the springtime, at home in Perth, an almighty din came blasting from a child's bedroom not unlike the cacophonous shriek of a flock of infant pterodactyls. The noise was made, it turns out, by four girls between the age of seven and 10, yodelling along to some spectacularly weedy schmaltz-pop drivel thundering from a 90s CD player: "We're sooooaaaarrrrin'!" they squawked. " Flyyyyyyyin'! There's norra star in heh-vun that we can't reeeeeech! If we're tryyyyyin'! So we're breakin' freeeeeeeeee!" "What's this, girls?" you found yourself chirping, instantly becoming the uncoolest "auntie" in the history of the starchy blouse and the howl went up in unison: "High School Myoozikuuuuuul!" And so, two years later than everyone else in Western civilisation (who has children under the age of 16), you found yourself having a one hour crash course into the most successful Disney TV movie franchise of all time.

And it could have been the glass of wine that did it, but it sounded, by the end, unexpectedly quite good, the kind of universal sap's pop only dead souls can't respond to and a jolly good laugh if you're singing along with some bairns.

Not as good, naturally, as SClub7 on a Saturday night and absolute piffling tripe, definitely, compared to Summer Nights, You're The One That I Want, Sandy and especially Hopelessly Devoted To You (swoon!) back in the 1970s when Grease was not only the greatest film in the history of "the pictures" but John Travolta was a proper hunk with proper hair not like that Zac Efron with his namby-pamby David Cassidy hair and all the girls were even cooler than the boys and the jokes were brilliant and the songs were no less than all-time classic genius On Wednesday, High School Musical 3 was released in the cinema, finally cashing in those biggest ever sale advances in cinematic history and it's arrived, for everyone's sake, just in time. Not a contemporary day goes by without parents being bombarded by the latest ways in which our fragrant young girls are robbed of their fleeting innocence, sex education "initiatives" waved in six-year-olds' bewildered faces before "growing up" to be addicted to alcopops, fags and dressing like a Las Vegas hooker by the age of approximately 11.

High School Musical, then, is exactly what families need, some foaming Disney dreamscape drivel so preposterously PC, sanguine, positive, feel-good and sex-free it makes Grease seem like a carnival of the damned in the Playboy Mansions directed by Roman Polanski, pulsating as it was a full 30 years ago with booze, fags, teenage pregnancy, boys with greasy hair, dropping out of high school to snog said boys with greasy hair in the back of an illegal motor and dressing up, yes, like a flagrant Las Vegas hooker.

We should be thankful, truly, we're not exposing our modern "angels" to such deadly profligate filth, the kind which inspired their mums to stuff socks down their bras for a laugh, especially me and the mother of one of those 10-year-old girls back in the bedroom in Perth, the very same bedroom we also used to dance in when Grease was the greatest girls'-own phenomenon of our approaching adolescent time and we not only saw it five times at "the pictures", but took John Travolta dancing lessons at a local school hall (even if our 1978 disco moves were more "John Travolta in Pulp Fiction in 1994") and sewed up any excess millimetre in our drainpipe cords so we looked "exactly" like Olivia Newton John in her sewn-in PVC splendour.

A few years after that, we all left school in the cultural wasteland of no jobs whatsoever in Scotland so it's just as well, for a while, our impossibly good-time teenage dreams were so jubilantly hard to beat. For the High School Musical generation, then, if they can glean even one millionth of the mirth, passion, choreographic bedlam and infinite hormonal frisson from the likes of plasma-faced android Zac Efron (who sounds - and possibly looks - like a state-of-the-art rival to the Dyson) as we did from our dubious gang of greased-up herberts, their world, too, will be infinitely more joyous for it.

The day will come, all too soon, when this generation also realises you don't always get the guy, or you get the guy and he turns out to be a psycho, the spectrum of mankind will never live "as one", you'll never have hair like Gabriella, Zac is destined for a cocaine-sex-shame breakdown shocker at the age of 23 and the only truthful thing Disney ever did was 66 years ago when they killed off Bambi's mum with a shotgun. By the end of this month, meanwhile, we'll be newly bombarded by High School Musical's all-new British cash-in, ITV's Britannia High, a "musical drama" set in a performing arts school and destined to be this generation's Fame. Cameos already confirmed for the series include Girls Aloud, Boyzone, the cast of Coronation Street, I'm A Celebrity winner Matt Willis from Busted and sometime financially bankrupt "comedian" Richard Blackwood. A combination which conjures, therefore, the all-too-realistic, grown-up, feel-bad concepts of alcohol-related male adultery, inter-band hatred, murder, reality TV stars forever in rehab and a dodgy so-called television personality everyone thinks is rubbish. How terribly British. No wonder Walt, indeed, Disnae