I could tell you what I think about Tormented (cute idea for a Brit school slasher horror-comedy, too slow and could have done with several more script drafts). Or about Synecdoche, New York (pretty much like everyone else, a mix of the impressively moving and the exasperatingly pretentious). Or about the BFI's re-release of the fascinating Mondo mockumentaries London in the Raw and Primitive London, and my chat with their director, 87-year-old Arnold L Miller, who also helmed the seminal nudie "educational" film Take Of Your Clothes and Live. But right now I want to tell you about La Clique at the Hippodrome.

I'm a sucker for circus in any case, the sublime refinement of elegantly pointless skill. And without wishing to sound like Tina Turner, this is simply the best bid I've ever seen at making it flourish outside a big top setting. The cabaret/burlesque setup suits perfectly the run of louche acts - juggler, contortionist, acrobalancers, torch singer, aerialist, skating duo and the wonderful Amy Gee, who also skates like Les Dawson plays the piano and also mimes playing the kazoo with her woo-woo. Some of the acts, such as acrobalancers The English Gentlemen, are among the finest I've seen, and even those whose skill is not of the first order have polished their schtick to a high lustre. It's the only timed I've ever been forced into audience participation (carrying singer Miao Miao to the stage, and unzipping her trousers, since you ask) and not hated it. Even the tacky, nightclubby acretions that barnacle Frank Matcham's magnificent 1900 Hippodrome add to the atmosphere.

Here's the rub. It is undoubtedly a great shame that La Clique is being forced to move to the Roundhouse because the Hippodrome is to become a casino. Often I'm ambivalent about the change of use of old theatre and cinema buildings - as long as the structure is preserved, who cares about the use?

In this case, though, I do feel sad. As my old theatre pr friend Ben told me, the false roof that hangs over La Clique's performing space covers off the upper galleries of Matcham's theatre, including the still-intact minstrel's gallery below the sliding roof, from which divers used to plunge in to the flooded stage. Backstage and below stage, the Hippodrome's elephant run, through which pachyderms were paraded, also still exists. You can see more historic images and recent images of the place at the ever-fascinating theatre and music hall website www.arthurlloyd.co.uk. I hope these parts of the Hippodrome survive its metamorphosis into a casino, just as they did its change-of-use to The Talk of the Town cabaret in the 1950s, and into a nightclub.