Maurice is no longer with us and London in October is no place for Barry - resident in Miami - to take his arthritic bones. Which means that it was left to Robin Gibb to represent the Bee Gees at this show to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever. But, if truth be told, even Robin was a spectral, fleeting presence throughout this televised concert. Wearing a suit that looked a little too big for his gaunt frame, he strode on in front of the BBC Concert Orchestra - whose players were dressed in white jackets and black shirts like Tony Manero in the film - and tackled More Than a Woman, gazing with nervous regularity at the area where one might find an autocue.

Not being Barry, he didn't attempt a falsetto. That was left to the bow-tied Aussie pop sensation Sam Sparro, who handled the film's two best-known songs, Night Fever and Stayin' Alive. Mercifully, he surmounted the task at hand with intelligence and panache - accentuating the grittiness of lyrics that, lest we forget, were written to represent Manero's desire to escape his humdrum working existence.

If poor Sharleen Spiteri struggled to impose her ownership over If I Can't Have You, it can't have helped that, at less than half her age, Gabriella Cilmi injected You Should Be Dancing (and, for the encore, Dionne Warwick's Bee Gees-penned Heartbreaker) with gravity-defying power. The gold- sequinned Cilmi wasn't the only singer who used this as an opportunity to exhibit her suitability to the big occasion. The irrepressible joy with which 23-year-old Bryn Christopher, from Birmingham, tore into Disco Inferno invigorated a crowd still trying to come to terms with the spectacle of Ronan Keating and Stephen Gately feasting on Jive Talkin' like vultures at the carcass of a once-proud animal.

With more experienced voices trounced by those of singers who had yet to be born when the songs were written, it was left to Robin Gibb to restore parity to the proceedings. To Love Somebody divined an exquisitely melancholy performance from him - in the process letting the orchestra loose on an era of Bee Gees music that suited it best. Shame that the sustained cheering that followed it couldn't persuade Gibb to dust down a few more where that came from.

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