Daddy Cool: 'The Glee take on classic songs is the first my girls hear'

THE new season of Glee has started and it is officially the favourite show of my two daughters, usurping Ugly Betty, Total Wipeout and Friends. If you don't know what Glee is then where have you been for the past six months?

You are free to reply that you have been doing something more interesting than watch a bunch of young, pretty American actors pretending to be geeks and slaughtering some of the greatest pop songs of the past 40 years, but I can't.

Well, not unless I want to provoke an argument just at the point when we have used said show and the threat of not being able to watch it to ensure that all homework is completed and bedrooms are tidy.

I could probably extend that to mowing the lawn, such is my daughters' enthusiasm for the antics at McKinley High, except it would mean taking everything out of the garden shed to get to the mower.

For the girls, the Glee take on classic songs is often the first version they hear.

This pains me. But do they want to know that You Can't Always Get What You Want was first recorded by the Rolling Stones on Let It Bleed in 1969? Nope.

Do they want to hear the original of You Keep Me Hangin' On, by the Supremes? Not particularly. Do they want dad to stop leaping up and rifling through his "funny record things"? Yes.

The cabinet filled with my old vinyl is in my older daughter's room. It moved from the living room to make way for the Christmas tree, and hasn't made its way back.

I have yet to catch her skimming through it or investigating ways to convert vinyl to MP3. Nor has she ever said, "You never told me you had the limited-edition EP of Walk On By, by the Stranglers, possibly one of the most interesting covers from the post-punk era."

So I up the technology for the antecedents of the mash-up of the Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me and Gary Puckett's Young Girl that features in season two.

We have the CD and younger daughter constantly plays it, though the Glee version is little more than half a verse or so and the refrain. So I set up the laptop and dig out the video on YouTube. She watches, interested but amused. "Who's that?" she asks, pointing to Sting, who is prancing around in a mortar board, name-checking Nabokov.

This could take a little while. As even I have moved on from mix tapes, I am planning to create a playlist on my iPod of as many of the original tracks from Glee as possible. At least then the girls can choose which they like best, though I'm not sure I'm going to like their answer.

• This article was first published in The Scotland on Sunday, May 2, 2010