The announcement that the hole left in the London Palladium schedule by the closure of the X Factor musical I Can’t Sing! would be filled with a revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats led to some feline media remarks about the substitute being a safe Christmas option. So it’s worth remembering that, in 1981, when Lloyd Webber and producer Cameron Mackintosh first announced a dance musical based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, they were regarded as barking, which may have been a mixed metaphor but reflected the feeling that they were heading for a more linguistically precise cat-astrophe.As it turned out, the first life of Cats lasted for 21 years and the second, which opened at the London Palladium last week, suggested that it should, over