demented

It's 27 years since a creamsuited Pleat danced dementedly across the Maine Road pitch after Raddy Antic's dramatic late winner kept Luton Town in the top flight.

He spins expertly on his Cuban heels as a piano is pummelled to the point of no return before howling dementedly at an imaginary moon.

It's got everything the X Factor does - deranged wannabes dementedly believing they can sing, - but it has the added bonus of Holly Willoughby (above) as host, a girl so lovely I'd burn my best friends at the stake if there was any hope of us hanging out.

Here we're asked to laugh at his dementedly unconventional trials of true love by generating artificial tensions.

Yet Elementary Particles is genuinely affecting in its vision of the end of the "brave and unfortunate species" that we as human beings have been, and of our replacement by the brave-new-worlders, made possible by Djerzinski's "risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics." For all the ferocity of his vision, Houellebecq does have a heart, and although he would probably not care to be told so, it is the palpable beating of that organ which lifts his work to heights that the dementedly fastidious Lovecraft could not have scaled in his wildest and weirdest dreams.

Imagine you're the frontman of, say, a Guns N' Roses cover band, playing your tribute to one of those bands whose fans are dementedly diehard.

Mills instead heads for Naylor and celebrates dementedly in his face.

Strongest asset among the holdovers is the priceless Coolidge, who puts such a dementedly original skew on her line readings as the dimwitted, big-hearted trailer-trash beautician that she enlivens every scene she's in.

If Wizzard's Roy Wood dementedly wishes for it to be THAT day EVERY day for the rest of his life or Noddy Holder screams 'IT'S CHRSTMAS' one more time across one more city centre department sound system, then serious consideration will be given to walking into the household gifts department, purchasing a box of crackers, strapping them to the torso and detonating them all at once in protest.

Dementedly zany, yes; benignly bonkers, perhaps - but hardly a tragic figure.

During the big debate in Congress over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, when Jesse Helms was dementedly brandishing homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in the well of the Senate, conservatives proposed that federal arts, funding he cut off entirely.

In a dementedly crowded investment space, there can easily be panic in finding the exit.