Ivan Vasiliev

As I so often do on a Sunday morning, I watched the Andrew Marr Show this weekend. He quite often ends the show with a guest from the arts and this week it was a young Russian - actually he is from Belarus - ballet dancer currently in London with the Bolshoi and seemingly casing a stir - Ivan Vasiliev. They call him the Rocket Man, so high he can leap.

Living and seeing dance almost entirely in Manchester and rather focused on British companies I was blithely unaware of this new ballet star until this point. The interview was stilted as he appears to speak little English. Andrew Marr gamely tried to question him on the sofa while the loathesome Peter Mandelson unctuously ingratiated himself - it appears Lord Mandelson is a 'balletomane' - a fact I find oddly depressing . Then they showed a clip of Vasiliev dancing for the BBC in a rehearsal room; I think it was a solo from Spartacus, which the Bolshoi are performing on this visit (when do we ever get to see that in Manchester?).

All I will say is that watching Ivan Vasiliev dance in a rehearsal room on TV gave me goosebumps. He's very, very good.

The new Baryshnikov? I'm sure he is. To be honest, to me, Baryshnikov is just the man who made Carrie Bradshaw give up her life in New York to be with him in Paris and then ignored her. But Vasiliev is impossibly light, balanced, strong and elegant and even from that small snippet I can quite imagine that there is no finer male classical ballet dancer in the world today.