Entertainment

 My favourite cruising activity, or rather inactivity, is sitting on the balcony reading with one eye and dolphin watching with the other. I've been doing a lot of this since we left Piraeus on our three day run down the Mediterranean. We're going east to west so we've got no sun on the balcony but it's warm and humid, like a sauna with a sea view. It's been most enjoyable but nothing has happened to disturb the normal routine of life at sea.

Janet suggested that I should blog about the juggler but some things are beyond parody. He was billed as a comic juggler but the audience didn't think he was funny and he rather let his frustration show. I really don't understand why anyone would risk booking a juggler for the Aurora. The theatre is jammed into the front end and, if the weather is a bit rough, the bows chop though the water and it's sometimes difficult for the dancers to keep their feet. Now juggling under those conditions would have been funny.

We've now had a magician, a ventriloquist and a juggler in the theatre, so I'm hoping for a performing dog or maybe even a mime artist before we get back to Southampton. We've only spotted 4 children so it looks like P&O have seriously overbooked on children's entertainers. The juggler's evening show has now been cancelled and he's been moved to an afternoon matinee at the same time as the Chocoholics Buffet. He must have annoyed the Cruise Director as well as his audience and it looks like revenge will be the sweets.

To be fair, the entertainment on this cruise has been above average, although this rating has been helped by the above excellent performances of the resident group Caravan. As well as playing all over the ship, they've done a couple of cabaret acts about the music of the Eagles and the BeeGees, which came as close to a standing ovation as you're likely to get from a room of elderly Brits with walking aids. We've had one very good speaker with a series of talks about the history of cinema and the films in Aurora's cinema would have been good if we hadn't seen most of them at the Island, St Annes. Dragging the average down, again, has been P&O's ubiquitous song and dance troupe, the Headliners.

As always the Headliners are young, energetic and for the most part talented. They are fine doing tributes to Abba or Queen in Carmens, the atmospheric show lounge, but in the proper theatre, trying to do musical stories, their youth and enthusiasm isn't enough. The productions and particularly the choreography would have been clichéd a generation ago and the cardboard set that says “Hitsville USA” should be decently buried at sea. Earlier this year there was a documentary on the TV about how the Headliners troupes were selected and trained in shed at Southampton docks. The good news is that the people in charge looked like they were heading towards their retirement dates. The bad news is that they might still have time to teach their successors everything they know.

Dave