Joyce McMillan: Song and dance over Silver Spartacus tells a story

WHEN I was a schoolgirl growing up in the 1960s, there was nothing I liked better on a wet Saturday afternoon than to settle down in front of the television to watch an old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie.

It wasn't just the soft-focus black-and-white beauty of the films themselves – although they are very classy pieces of work, with terrific dance sequences, and fabulous songs by composers like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin – it was ...