A gift or curse?

Michael is 11, learning two musical instruments and seven languages, including Mandarin and Old Norse. He's also a gourmet cook, preparing a medieval lunch for his family.

His mother, an Oxford don, knew he was particularly bright when he snatched a copy of Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban from her hands and said: "I can read it faster myself".

Six-year-old Adam has the mathematical ability of a 16-year-old. At three, Mikhail is the youngest member of Mensa and, at six, Aimee became the youngest person admitted to the Royal College of Music. And what a brainy lot the Grafton-Clarke clan is. All four children are in the "gifted" category.

They all featured in Child Genius, the first of an occasional series following these brainboxes as they grow up. What it showed was that brains aren't everything. For most, being more intelligent than everyone else their age was more of a curse than a blessing.

Several parents had resorted to home education because they couldn't find suitable schools. The children themselves - and the way they spoke like mini-adults, I had to keep reminding myself some still hadn't achieved double figures age-wise - found it difficult to make friends and do the sort of things other children do.

Eleven-year-old Dante prefers to argue philosophical points with a university lecturer to kicking a ball around with his friends (if he had any). He suffers from depression and low self-esteem, causing his parents to send him to psychologists.

Adam's parents have moved home six times in five years in search of the right school for him. This has had an adverse effect on his younger brother.

Parents can be as pushy as those we saw in another C4 documentary on junior ballroom dancing earlier this week. Elizabeth Grafton-Clarke feels it's an obligation to society to create doctors, physicians and politicians from her intelligent children - "a huge obligation to mankind," she called it.

For that reason, the family live in splendid isolation without friends and little contact with the outside world. They even refused to take an IQ test as part of the C4 series.

Mikhail's parents spend all waking hours improving his amazing maths skills but Professor Joan Freeman - billed as an expert on giftedness - pointed out, he was good at sums but not so good at other things because of intensive coaching on just one subject.

You don't have to belong to Mensa to watch Benidorm. All that's needed is a coarse sense of humour.

Madge, the bronzed pensioner in the mobility scooter, is proving a treat with a tactless remark for every occasion. She's full of stories, like the time she went into labour. "My waters broke when I was up the ladder cleaning the windows. No one ran up to help. Mrs Carr just thought I'd wrung my chamois out and missed the bucket," she recalled.

Even she couldn't top nightclub magic act Sticky Vicky. While other magicians pull rabbits out of a hat, the 60-year-old woman produced the flags of all nations from a very intimate part of her body.

Guys And Dolls

Sunderland Empire

YOU'RE always walking a fine line by shouting "crap" on stage during a musical, but Frank Loesser's masterpiece has rolled winning dice since 1950. Director Michael Grandage's re-working of the amusing love affairs of two unreliable New York gamblers makes the clever choice of using songs from the original version and the popular 1955 film.

There is an unexpected slowness about this touring version which makes a running time of two hours 40 minutes a little sweaty-palmed. Temperatures in the packed venue appear to hit the sleep-inducing heights of Havana, the place that Nathan Detroit (Alex Ferns) bets Sky Masterson (Norman Bowman) he can't take Salvation Army stalwart Sarah Brown (Louise Dearman). However, the trio are outshone by Samantha Janus, as Nathan's long-suffering nightclub entertainer girlfriend Miss Adelaide, who has managed to link her sexy blonde low-brainer act to a fine singing voice. All four earned their spurs in the West End version, but Ferns deserves a special mention, having learned to sing and dance in rehearsals for this show.

Christian Patterson, as Nicely Nicely Johnson, takes charge of the show-stealing Sit Down You're Rockin' The Boat and doesn't fumble his big opportunity. This isn't quite in the standing ovation territory yet, but I wouldn't want to bet my soul against a two-week run in Sunderland delivering the goods.

* Runs until February 17. Box Office: 0870-602-1130

Viv Hardwick

Larrikin Love

Northumbria University

IN terms of hot bands for 2007, it seems The Gossip are winning the race for the most hype. However, Londoners, Larrikin Love have quietly gone about their business and are quickly building up a huge fanbase.

The venue has changed from the Cluny to the University and the quality has, thankfully, got better. They've added a superb lighting show and a violinist to the stage and it just adds to their brilliance.

Having opened with Six Queens, they rattled through a packed 60-minute set of album tracks, B-sides and a few tracks that have never been recorded properly. As usual, it was Happy As Annie that got the biggest cheer of the night and sent the place wild. They finished with the excellent Calypso, a track full of cowbells, whistles and anything else that can make a sound; and there was even a juggler on stage. It's a cracking set closer and it sent the crowd home happy.

Keir Waugh