As Rusty zips along the track that runs through the auditorium shouting "Let's hear it for steam", the cheers have a slightly tinny ring: he doesn't look enough like a steam-engine to inspire nostalgic affection (in fact, James Gillan looks rather like Julian Clary, which takes some oomph out of the romantic sub-plot). The outcome is too predictable to create any real satisfaction; the big emotional numbers - "Starlight Express", "Next Time You Fall in Love" - are hollow simulacra of genuine feeling.Still, the dancing has verve and precision, and Andrew Lloyd Webber's score is at its best an expertly constructed, tuneful pastiche. Just as there are times when only a Big Mac will do, so there are certain appetites to which we are all prone, that can only satisfied by a show like Starlight Express. Electra, "train of the future", seems particularly dated with his scarlet- sprouting hair and hints of gender-bending ("I am electric," runs his theme song, conjuring up unwelcome memories of Gary Numan; "AC, DC, it's all the same to me").The feel-good story-line doesn't induce many noticeably good feelings, either. Although the original production team (director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Arlene Phillips, designer John Napier) came together to substantially rework the production four years ago, its fetishistic leather-and-studs costumes and Hot Gossip dancing give it a period charm it was never meant to have. The plot, involving a fantasy race between railway trains, is only vestigially coherent, the characterisation null, the music derivative, the lyrics (by Richard Stilgoe) often vacuous - "Gotta be in the fame if you're gonna win the game," the trains sing.Even on the level it aspires to, as pure spectacle, it is flawed. Almost fourteen years after this popular show first rolled into the Apollo Theatre, Robert Hanks makes a return journey on the 'Starlight Express' Some artistic endeavours exist beyond criticism - they push themselves, by sheer weight of popular acclaim or scale of spectacle, to heights where psephologists and quantity surveyors dare. Starlight Express clearly aspires to be one of those.

It involves several showstopping numbers, most of which are not musical: the original production cost pounds 2.25 million to stage (and that was in 1984, when pounds 2.25 million pounds was worth something). The set needed 750 gallons of paint and varnish, six miles of timber, two and a half acres of sheet wood and 60 tonnes of steel, and includes 1,500 light bulbs, 1,200 lanterns and 6,000 small lights. The performers have used 25,000 pairs of skate laces, 25,000 skate wheels and 17,500 toe stops, and have reached a top speed of 40 mph. Over seven million people have seen the London production, including Alan Newman, a postman from Kent, who has been 750 times at a cost of around pounds 21,000, and the Pearton family, who have come every week for the last four years.Faced with such an overwhelming endorsement of the show's populist credentials, criticism seems beside the point. As a matter of purely theoretical interest, we might as well be clear that, judged by conventional critical standards, Starlight Express is not great drama. Of course, the Cortina came a poor second to its Ford stablemate, the Capri, the rich man's piece of hand-me-down americana on wheels. But whereas you can still catch sight of the Capri every now and again, the Mk III Cortina is nowhere to be seen.

Nasty Mk IVs clutter up the roads to this day and the earlier marques are now collectables, but the determinedly unfashionable Mk III refuses to make a comeback from the country's scrapyards and is all the more desirable for it.. The bowl, 6ins tall, is pounds 300 and the dish, 61/2ins tall, is pounds 350 at Back to Life, a selling exhibition at the Craft Centre and Design Gallery at Leeds' City Art Gallery, until Saturday (Tuesday- Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 10am-4pm, details 0113-2478241).. Few motors ("motor", mind - no mere car) are as redolent of the late Seventies and early Eighties as the Ford Cortina Mk III - the high point of a model that wanted to make boy racers of an entire generation. Back then, 10-year-olds reared on the road-eating antics of The Dukes of Hazzard saw in the Cortina the outlaw swagger of a suburban General Lee. Equally importantly, this cheap 'n' cheerful hotrod was a car you coveted precisely because you had mates whose parents picked them up from school in it. Some of the extruded clay used for the handles of his tripod bowl have migrated to form its feet It looks as if it could walk away. The other vessel, a rocking dish, might do just that if you keep tapping it.

They come off the wheel round and he squashes them oval, so that they rock. He fantasises about them creeping from behind posters on the wall and joining him for dinner. 282 Richmond Road, London E8 3QS (0181-986 3409). The potter Walter Keeler is renowned not only for his signature saltglaze vessels that look like oil cans but for his pots' slightly disconcerting sense of animation. Thom Winterburn, who graduated from the RA last year, is showing his heads at London's Paton Gallery until 1 February. What does the winner of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters' coveted pounds 5,000 Ondaatje gold medal do as a relief from the rigours of oil and canvas? He buys a pack of Blu-Tack and fashions inch-high grotesque grimacing heads out of it. Lloyd, a contemporary of Damien Hirst's at Goldsmiths reflected that drink carried off the premises is unprotected, and devised a remedy. Complete with padlock and key, the caged champagne is pounds 200 and the beer pounds 100 in Ideas For Sale, part of Sarah Staton's Supastore of multiple artworks at the Arnolfini Gallery, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA (0117-9299191).

Like an after-Christmas nightmare, Wayne Lloyd's can of beer and bottle of champagne are caged in steel mesh. The sculptures were inspired by off-licences in tough inner-city areas where the drink is caged up and purchases are made through a hatch. His paper is called "Encoding the mobile body: the construction of the tramp". Its inclusion among many others which speak such language shows how far geography has come.Logaston Press: Little Logaston, Woonton Almeley, Herefordshire HR3 6QH; Reaktion Books, 11 Rathbone Place, London W1P 1DE; John Wiley, 01243 779777; Cinema Club, from HMV Direct 0990 334578.. We meet him begging.People who lose their place become indigent and mendicant They wander in the creases in the map of civilisation. Like cowboys, having no single place, they seem blessed at least in being familiar with many.That is why we can expect to enjoy the work of the geographer Tim Cresswell, to be featured at the IBG's conference.