LAST week I went to the cinema and saw a film that was so moving that the audience burst into spontaneous applause when it finished.

What was this cinematic masterpiece? Schindler’s List? Fargo? Citizen Kane? Get away with you.

This was Mamma Mia, the film of a stage show cobbled together from the back catalogue of a Eurovision Song Contest winner.

It was slight, it was sentimental, it was unrealistic – and it was absolutely wonderful.

An audience of excited women with a few sheepish-looking men in tow had been transported out of their workaday lives to spend two hours on a Greek island with Meryl Streep, Julie Walters, Colin Firth – and Abba.

When the cast belted out Dancing Queen, us female viewers were all young and sweet, only 17 (again): yes, disbelief was well and truly suspended. Nobody thought it peculiar that the actors were bursting into song mid-scene – we were too busy (inwardly) singing along ourselves.

I was soaking up the scenery, I was laughing and on more than one occasion I was reaching for the hankie with a big fat lump in my throat.

I don’t want to give away too much, but there’s a point when a well-known face turns up among the actors. “It’s him!”, gasped the woman next to me, pointing vigorously at the screen before she realised that this wasn’t actually real life, and covered her mouth as she collapsed in embarrassed laughter.

And towards the end of the film there’s a bit when one of the actors addresses the audience directly – and in our case, the audience roared back.

And yet this is a form of stage and screen drama that so many people say they just can’t stand.

What is it about musicals that turns some people into raging beasts?

Mention the very word to the Other Half, for example, and he starts frothing at the mouth and snarling. Suggest that he might like to try one and it’s time for a strait-jacket and a padded cell.

I know he’s not alone, either. Perfectly rational people turn wild-eyed and obsessive if you try to make out there might occasionally be artistic merit in a musical.

Sometimes I think they might have a point. I’ve never been one for The Sound Of Music, for example; and I’ve seen The Wizard Of Oz quite enough for one lifetime (although I still can’t get enough of the Cowardly Lion).

But how can anyone say that Cabaret is not one of the sexiest, most sinister things ever to hit the screens? Or that West Side Story is not a tour de force of song and dance?

Who can say Gene Kelly is unwatchable when he gets going with a brolly or a cartoon mouse? Or Danny Kaye, or Cyd Charisse?

And how can you say that you hate all musicals – the whole lot of them, as a form of entertainment?

What is most infuriating is that if you occasionally manage to con a musical-hater into going to a film with musical content, they love it.

The Other Half adores Billy Elliot, for example, and he quite enjoyed The Full Monty, but if you challenge him about either of these, he just says they don’t count. Perhaps the gruff northern-ness of the characters makes up for any jessie qualms about singing or dancing.

I don’t know how to sell musicals, I’m afraid. All I know is that Mamma Mia gave me and the rest of that cinema audience the kind of lift you don’t get from smart films about things exploding or people being killed in ever more inventive ways.