Say what you like about Wrestlemania, you get a fantastically generous serving of bogus sport for your £14.95. At American wrestling's big pay-per-view season-clincher - the Super Bowl, if you will, of faintly homoerotic grappling-in-leather chaps - the fake fights just keep on coming.

But first a fly-past by the US Air Force. No, seriously. And then America the Beautiful sung by John Legend - a singer, rather than a wrestler, although clearly the name could have taken him happily in either direction. And only after those necessary preliminaries were the decks clear for four hours of suspiciously broad slapping and grunting, featuring more wrestlers than you could shake a stackable chair at.

Nearly everyone in WWE looks like Jack Black after a course of genetic doping. Is that John Cena? Or Shawn Michaels? Not sure. Maybe it's both, grafted together. And, hey, there's the Edge - except not that one. Not unless the U2 guitarist has taken to gym work and injecting himself with cavity insulation. The Edge brings to the ring a torso so pumped that all of his airbags seem to have gone off before he has even hit anything. No class, you say? The Glamazon portion of the evening (female wrestlers in lingerie) had Snoop Dogg as MC. That's how classy it was.

Now, I should confess that Wrestlemanias I through XXIII somehow eluded my schedule. Come the early hours of Monday, I was a Wrestlemania virgin. That said, I've always had the utmost respect for WWE as top-class, edge-of-the-seat entertainment - if you are 10.

Here's my confusion, though. Pay-per-view events costing £14.95, beamed in from Florida and commencing at midnight on a school night, are not straightforwardly targeted at the ten-year-old demographic, unless children are growing up even faster than the Daily Mail is telling us. And, unless I badly misunderstand the marketing here, this would have to mean that people older than 10 are watching. And, call me old-fashioned, but the thought that impressionable children are thrilling to the cod travails of the terrifyingly dead-eyed Undertaker seems far less disturbing than the thought that adults are.

Still, what do the grown-ups get for staying up and buying in? Well, for one thing, the sight of Big Show taking on Floyd Mayweather Jr, the boxer. And, for another, more violence. The pre-watershed WWE shows freeze the image shortly before the point of impact between prop and wrestler, thus exposing tender minds to the prospect of cracking someone on the forehead with a dustbin without exposing them to the consequences. Tricky parental call, I'd say.

At least in Tom and Jerry, Tom's head would briefly swell up after a battering. But then, in so many ways, Tom and Jerry is a work of documentary realism by comparison with WWE. At any rate, the cartoon's basic assumption (cats chase mice) reveals it to have at least some basis in the natural world. You will scratch your head for a long time before you find any WWE equivalent.

But, of course, WWE isn't just a sport. It's also a soap opera - in which area, the significant plot development you need to know is that Hornswoggle the dwarf is not, after all, the son of Mr McMahon, the suited WWE chairman, but rather the offspring of Finlay, the Irish scrapper.

I know, I couldn't believe it, either. Incidentally, Mr McMahon, in accordance with one of WWE's bolder initiatives on openness, periodically conducts his business from the ring - a bracing attitude to administration from which other sports organisations could surely gain. If Richard Scudamore, the chief executive of the Premier League, had had to stand in the middle of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium with a microphone and bellow his “game 39” plan to 60,000 inquisitive supporters, he might have ended up thinking differently about it.

Anyway, on the night, Hornswoggle and his real dad came off badly against someone or other with swollen pectorals. Ric Flair lost and retired, an outcome that seemed to have people - grown people - in tears. And Mayweather? Well, things weren't looking too promising for the diminutive boxer when Big Show put the old knee-drop on him. But Mayweather rallied when someone slipped him a stackable chair and, having exchanged his boxing gloves for a set of gold knuckledusters, he was able to clinch the match, delivering what one feels unusually entitled to describe as a sucker-punch.

How the crowd roared. But where else, I guess, are you going to see someone with a chest the size of a washing machine clobber over the head with a dustbin a person of restricted height dressed as a leprechaun? Only at Wrestlemania, in the middle of the night, at a price just south of £15. Kids, you should have been awake.