Feet first

Fire up YouTube on the iPad, tap in ‘tap’, then wave goodbye to the rest of your day: clip after clippety-clip of the best and brightest stars rattling out impossible rhythms: Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling; Fayard and Harold Nicholas taking the stairs one split jump at a time; Gene Kelly singing (and dancing) in the rain.

The American actor, writer and entertainer Clarke Peters (anything from The Wire to Five Guys Named Moe) was never dragged to tap-dancing classes as a boy in the late 1950s — ‘it was more ballet and jazz by then’ — but he remembers ‘trying to pick up moves from the films. I think I do what I do because of Gene Kelly. He wasn’t a great tap dancer but I loved his athleticism, his style.’

Peters is modest about his own powers — ‘I’m the best tapper in the world in my kitchen’ — but his background in musicals and revue and his affection for the dancers of old made him a logical choice to present BBC4’s Tap America, one of a sudden rash of dance programmes crowding the May schedule.

The hour-long nostalgia-fest is vaguely reminiscent of the old MGM That’s Entertainment! compilations but dresses upthe archive footage as social history with the help of a team of dance commentators and academics (UCLA has its own ‘tap scholar’, apparently). These tell us little we didn’t already know about the roots of tap dancing, which was essentially the synthesis of two US immigrant traditions: the African rhythms imported by the slaves and the stiff-bodied step-dancing of the Irish jig. Black ‘buck dancers’ elaborated and refined this new, multirhythmic form which was widely admired and routinely copied, not least by the infamous blackface minstrels of the 1830s (and beyond).