Cast your vote for the best song ever

ELAINE PAIGE is about to Let It Go, before they Send In The Clowns.

Yes, they’re song titles. From noon today, those two numbers, from Frozen and A Little Night Music respectively, will be on a list of 50 which listeners can choose from, to decide the BBC Radio 2 Favourite Song From A Musical.

The channel will launch a weekend celebration of musicals next month (date to be announced).

Then, on January 31, Paige will devote her Radio 2 Sunday show to a special Top 20 countdown, before revealing the voters’ number one choice for best song from a stage or screen musical.

Easy, right? No! It’s hellishly difficult, but enormous fun, too. There will be rows.

I was part of the panel, along with Paige, West End star

Marisha Wallace and arts entrepreneur Sita McIntosh, tasked with compiling a Top 50.

First, we were each asked to come up with our favourite 100. Then we had to boil that figure down . . . and it was tough, having to eliminate some of the greatest songs ever written.

Not sure if I’m allowed to vote again! However, I’ll certainly be tuning into Paige’s broadcast on January 31. (For details of how you can take part, visit bbc.co.uk/radio2 from noon today.)

By the way, Paige’s status as Britain’s queen of the musicals was confirmed when I watched her, last Saturday night, playing Queen Rat in Pantoland at the London Palladium.

Here was an artist — the original Evita! . . . the original Grizabella in Cats (Memory’s on the list)! — a star of West End and Broadway, sending herself up, and her career, too. It was a peerless turn.

I’m saddened that because the theatres in London were shut down on Tuesday night, others won’t get to see her, or Julian Clary, Beverley Knight and their co-stars.