While the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing recently twirled the waltz and tango before a new audience, John Retallack's touching but simplistic throwback to a lost era reminds us that a whole swathe of the country's population never forgot them.
Lonely 70-somethings Audrey, Sylvia, Roy and Victor sit nervously at a tea dance, listening to the tinny strains of "Raymond on the synth". Monologues reveal that they have all suffered recent bereavement, and that ballroom dancing defined, either literally or metaphorically, each marriage.
Sylvia and Pierre ran a dance school; Victor and Constance discovered that moves on the dance floor could lead to other sorts of moves; and Audrey feared the worst on her wedding day when she discovered that Graham had no sense of rhythm.
As the pensioners reminisce, four actors portraying their lithe younger selves shadow them, sometimes even swooping to take them for a spin. Jack Murphy's elegant choreography is a delight and the dancing skills are considerable from all eight performers.
Yet the combination of shameless nostalgia - for the days of big-band sounds, for men and women playing by an acknowledged set of gender rules - and self-help parlance about the future being what you make it, play to diminishing returns.
By the time Victor has had his umpteenth pep talk from the ghostly voice of his late wife, we'd be happy for him to ravish Audrey right there in front of the tea trolley, so long as it meant that the inevitably upbeat finale could be hastened forwards.
Co-directors Retallack and Murphy coax fine work from Graham Bill as Victor, a man bereft without his life-long love, and Joanna Morton as young Constance, wordlessly conveying the spirit that so entranced him. If only they had learnt when to make a timely retreat from the floor.
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