U Can't Touch my dancing, Miley

Dancing and my feet go together like Miley Cyrus and subtlety.

Rhythm is not so much in my soul as it is in my backside.

For women, the beat begins with the gyrating hips. For men, it begins with the bottom.

Many male dancers behave in a fashion that suggests we're trying to scratch an itch deep within our backside without using our hands.

When it comes to dancing, my father taught me everything he knows, which was: Clap like a performing sea-lion; spin around occasionally while shouting "I was doing this when Michael was still singing ABC"; and, most importantly, never take a drink onto the dance floor for fear of spilling it.

I once saw my father do all of the above at once ... Whilst taking a beer onto the dance floor. The other dancers were treated to the skinniest, whitest Michael Jackson impersonator in history and a glob of beer in the eye.

My father always had a weakness for Michael Jackson and the Bee Gees. At family gatherings, the opening beats of Billie Jean usually ended up with my Dad spinning around and grabbing his crotch. It just wasn't appropriate behaviour for a school sports day.

As a result, I'm still shamelessly partial to a sudden burst of Billie Jean or Staying Alive.

The Bee Gees bring out the best and worst of mankind.

As soon as the falsettos fill the speakers, everyone thinks they are John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Then they catch a glimpse of themselves and realise they look like John Travolta with a fever.

But my real weakness was MC Hammer. It still is.

For anyone too young to remember, MC Hammer was a short-lived American rapping sensation, famous for his infectious tunes, big glasses and trousers wider than the Causeway.

His international smash hit was U Can't Touch This.

Now I know that between this sentence and the one above, many of my generation have just hummed: "U Can't Touch This... Dill dill dill dill... dill dill... dill dill... U Can't Touch This."

Some of you might have even shouted: "Stop! Hammer Time!"

Right now, I'm hip-hopping around the office, bouncing up and down with a pair of curtains tied to each leg and shouting: "And this is a beat, huh, you can't touch..."

(I knew I shouldn't have watched the YouTube video for this column. U Can't Touch This has had almost 63 million hits - and half of them were me.)

Looking back, there was a ludicrous innocence to MC Hammer's dance routines. He sang "U Can't Touch This". Well, of course you couldn't. He was wearing trousers wide enough to cover a circus tent.

No one was touching anything.

And we didn't have twerking either. Had someone asked me if I fancied "twerking" back then, I would've assumed they had a speech impediment and was offering some turkey.

Miley Cyrus isn't a turkey. But she did look like the last boiled chicken in a coffee shop window.

Her skin-coloured underwear did her no favours.

At times, during her now infamous VMA performance, it wasn't clear if she was about to sing another song or be hung next to the roasted duck.

Now I know you're supposed to go off the rails, Miley. You're an US child star. It's perfectly normal.

From Drew Barrymore to Macaulay Culkin, there's always a mini-rebellion in the difficult puberty years.

Frankly Miley, I'd have been disappointed if you weren't drinking hard liquor from a leprechaun's belly button by the time you were 19.

But no one expected this from Hannah Montana. No one expected the twerking.

We've had our dance crazes. From The Twist to the Macarena, the Time Warp and Gangnam Style, we've all got jiggy with it.

But none of us have ever twerked in front of Beetlejuice before.

I assume the guy in the black and white suit was Beetlejuice. He could have been an escaped convict, which would've explained the striped suit and the wearing of sunglasses inside a darkened venue.

Now I'm desperately keen not to fall into the Sad Old Man routine here.

I have a young daughter. I know the lyrics of at least one Justin Bieber song and know that there is a One Direction member called Harry something... (Truman?).

It's not that I thought the twerking backside was seedy, desperate and misogynistic (though it was all of those things), it just looked so devoid of real fun.

My Dad doing Michael Jackson doing Billie Jean was fun. Others laughed with me as I did MC Hammer doing U Can't Touch This.

But Cyrus' performance wasn't fun or sexy. It was Beetlejuice dancing with a boiled chicken.

If anything, her show could put you off the dance floor. It'll certainly put you off chicken rice.

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