The English Youth Ballet was set up in 1998 as a pilot project to give young dancers in the regions of England more opportunities to perform in full length classical ballets.The producers hire professional dancers for the main roles which would be to difficult for students, and then they book lots of children — and I mean lots!

In the grand finale there must have been more than 100 on the stage, maybe 150. They range in age from five or six to 17 or 18, but the delightful tots far outnumber the teenagers, and the girls, as in all ballet training, hugely outnumber the boys.

You don’t go to a performance like this expecting The Royal Ballet; you go looking for charm, for fun. You go to admire the terrific effort these children have put in to bring the show up to scratch, and you go to see if you can spot some star quality among the very mixed bag of young performers on the stage.

When you’re doing that you have to remember that the young and precocious aren’t necessarily the ones who will mature into the greatest dancers — Yuri Soloviev, who had the most amazing jump I have ever seen, was known at the Kirov school for not being able to jump at all.

This is a fun show, which opens with Drosselmeyer in his toy-workshop making dolls. Eight jerky mini-Coppelias gradually spring to life, and dance again at the Christmas party, to the amazement of the other children.

It’s a well thought out production, with the central role of Clara excellently danced and acted by Katherine Collings. But the star of the show is tiny Alfie Stewart as Fritz, Clara’s young brother. He seems born for the stage, with a huge personality, bags of confidence and an instinctive feel for how to put a role across. He can dance, too, as we saw later in a jolly jig.