..And so it begins. Nelonen's big Autumn kick-off has begun, and half way through watching the first episode of Dance (Nelonen at 19:00, days vary) I am struck by an emotion. Firstly, I admit to feeling a stab of jealousy as dozens of attractive, lithe young people contort their bodies in unfathomable positions with the gracefulness of gazelles prancing through the African savannah. Immediately after this envy hits me I thrust it to one side with the knowledge that none of them can hold a candle to my personal dancefloor trademark: the patented drum-and-bass "windmill on acid" style, popularised in shady London nightclubs in the early 1990s.

Dance is a slightly racier version of MTV3's Dancing with the Stars. MTV3's show pairs pro dancers with an amateur and everything is done as a couple. Dance contestants can perform in a group but they could still be expelled from the contest individually, adding a little frisson of internal friction in those cases. Most entrants, however, are all on their toes. Basically, it's Fame for the beginning of the tweens. The head judge is the well-known dance instructor Marco Bjurström, who once actually gave me some lessons, believe it or not, as a result of which my tango showed definite signs of improvement. He's accompanied by professional dancer Merja Satulehto, as well as a woman whose name I didn't catch. The presenter is Axl Smith, a Lenny Kravitz-lookalike who has worked on MTV (the music one).

So, that's the staff, what about the contestants? Unlike in Pop Idols, where you get a bunch of people who blatantly have no idea what they're doing and can't sing for toffee but just thought they'd enter for the hell of it, in Dance most of them have had some training in dancing or at the very least have spent years practising in front of the mirror in their parent's basement. The quality of the entrants is annoyingly high – annoying since it immediately means I can't make many mean jokes at their expense.

Yet another positive thing about this show is that unlike in some other international versions of it, there are pleasingly few 'street-dancers' a.k.a. middle-class teenagers faffing about in tracksuits and wonky caps pretending they're in Wild Style. I hate that kind of people. The fact there aren't many of them yet the all the ads for the series have almost exclusively involved these type of youngsters looking moodily at the camera is more of an indicator of the show's intended demographic than anything else. What we do have are some very talented people most of whom seem irritatingly down-to-earth and normal, simply saying 'I love to dance'. Thas' cool, I can dig it. I don't understand a lot of it, mind. Even the weirdos are weird by virtue of their massive egos rather than their social dysfunction.

In fact, the most unusual thing is how harsh the judges are – not in that naff Simon Cowell kind of way where they're just rude and mean, but straight-talking in a very Finnish way. If I were them I'd be tempted to let almost everyone continue to the next round in Levi, but Bjurström in particular is very direct. Within seconds of an entrant finishing their routine he's said either, 'that was great', or 'get out of the building'. But he's not a hard-ass. He even started crying after one performance, which just shows that he's a really nice guy after all.

Nick Barlow