Male bonding – see it to believe it

Certainly the alpha male (let's call him Mr Fletcher) was lording it over the younger male members of his extended family as they gathered round the barbecue.

Last weekend's hot sunny days and mellow, temperate evenings definitely brought out the caveman in most of our neighbours.

From around 6pm on Saturday the air was full of the aromatic tang of paraffin as practically every garden in our street played host to a barbie.

Just as the ping on our microwave signalled that yet another culinary feast was about to be served up in Maison Cain, over the fence the Fletcher clan (males only) gathered round the big Silverback to admire his dexterity with a fork and packet of sausages.

Mr Fletcher was resplendent in a pair of sky-blue Bermuda shorts and a jaunty wipe-clean apron featuring a banana.

Considering that I usually only see him in the morning when he leaves for work wearing a suit of the most sensible navy blue pin-striped variety, this down time ensemble came as something of a sartorial eye-opener.

But that visual jolt was nothing compared to the new industrial-sized barbecue that suddenly appeared to be filling around 60 per cent of his back garden.

Truly, this great black metallic maw was the Chernobyl of domestic barbecue equipment.

As a column of dense black smoke rose into the air like a Red Indian distress signal, Mr Fletcher could just be seen valiantly prodding away at the pork products splayed out on the grill before him, while his teenage sons - three etiolated boys who I'd never actually seen in the great outdoors before - stood around him like devoted acolytes to a Celtic druid, occasionally anointing the charred offerings with unguents spooned from jars bearing the smiling face of Ainsley Harriot. (We live quite cheek by jowl and I did have my glasses on).

Occasionally the boys would emit a whoop of hormonal joy as their father enjoyed a sausage success, managing to extract a particularly blackened item from the barbie and place it between the enticingly plump cushions of a split finger roll.

The youngster chosen to receive this bounty would then lope off to the end of the garden where, crouched alone beneath the wisteria, he would proceed to devour the largesse distributed by the alpha male.

Once the hot dog was finished, the boy would make a bee-line back to the barbecue where he would proceed to participate in more conciliatory bonding/grooming behaviour (including shouts of "nice one", "you beauty" and "come to daddy") until the big Silverback - well, Mr Fletcher - noticed him again.

This touching display continued for almost an hour, until the sausages ran out and the replete Fletcher boys, including the senior member of the troupe, retired indoors to watch Dr Who.

Meanwhile, the garden looked like a bomb had hit it.

The havoc that four hungry males can wreak on a patio garden is a thing to behold.

It was then, and only then, that the shy female emerged blinking nervously in the light of the setting sun.

While Mrs Fletcher had been notably absent during the whole poking, burning, marinading ritual, it appeared that only she was capable of cleaning up properly after the rest of the phalange had moved on to trash fresh territory.

At that moment the exhausted Mr F was, no doubt, flat out on the sofa congratulating himself on being an ace provider and barbecue chef of some distinction, and his boys probably agreed with him.

After all, there's obviously some latent hunter-gatherer gene that switches on at puberty to remind every male that the only thing more attractive than a nubile girl in a fur bikini is the smell of burning flesh.

Meanwhile, Mr Fletcher's wife spent the next two hours trying to restore some semblance of order in the garden and shut down the towering inferno.

"I wouldn't mind," she told me as I leaned over the wall, Les Dawson-style, to offer some moral support, "but I'm actually a vegetarian!"

Just remember, behind every great man with a toasting fork and a jar of Ainsley's Big Cajun Marinade is a tight-lipped woman called Barbara.

AFTER consuming all that manly, hormone-enriched red meat, I'm not sure that the teenage Fletcher boys would have been in the mood for either of my current favourite Saturday night reality' TV shows - Any Dream Will Do on BBC1 and Grease Is The Word on ITV1.

OK, I'm not proud of myself, but there's something about both of those musicals that makes me feel all tingly and nostalgic. I'm sure that every child in the country must have appeared in a production of Joseph at some point in their schooldays, and I still have humiliating memories of trying to sneak into Watford's Empire Cinema to see Grease with my friends (despite the fact that I was patently not old enough to see a film with an AA classification) and being the only one to be turfed out.Rather cruelly, in the battle to increase ratings these two programmes have now been scheduled against each other, which means I've had to make a choice between them. As my husband refuses to watch TV trash of this sort, I've been holed up in the bedroom flicking between channels on our weeny, non-digital portable.

For me, Joseph wins the contest every time.

Is this or is this not the campest programme on television? From presenter Graham Norton to a large number of the would-be Josephs themselves who at best seem completely oblivious to (and at worst slightly frightened by) the gyrations of the glamorous female dancers brought in to spice up their audition pieces, this is kitch n' synch drama of the first order.

I doubt that even Eurovision can match it. Presiding over the whole thing is Andrew Lloyd-Webber, who must hold the dubious distinction of being one of the only men in the world able to make David Gest (one of the judges for Grease over on ITV1) look attractive.

To paraphrase the rather brilliant words of Tim Rice, who seems to be completely forgotten as the lyricist of Joseph - "half close your eyes, to see for certain what you thought you knew" - Dave and Lord Lloyd-Webber were separated at birth.