Strictly Come Dancing’s shock first result was a jawdropper – and a canny move by the BBC
Admittedly it’s not up there with the Horizon Post Office affair or Huw Edwards – or even Jermaine Jenas come to that – but Toyah Willcox not getting her coat (and her cowboy boots) and being sashayed out of the door at the first opportunity by the BBC puts Strictly Come Dancing straight back in the scandal spotlight.
It’s actually a canny sideways shimmy from the Strictly powers-that-be. Following a summer beset with scandals involving pro dancer behaviour towards their celeb partners, this extra happy-clappy Strictly needed to shift the narrative away from the G-word (Giovanni, ye shall not darken our doors) and on to the show itself.
Poor young Olympic swimming champ Tom Dean turned out to be the fall guy in this scenario, given that any man who dropped into the bottom two in the first vote was bound to get the dreaded boot. It was a result that had very little to do with talent and all about redressing the gender imbalance – a gender imbalance directly down to Strictly’s shocker of a summer.
There’s been no official word on how many female invitees turned down the opportunity to be locked in a room with a Strictly male pro, but a line-up featuring nine male celebs and just six females tells its own story. Willcox, less a dancer, more of a wind-up rag doll, scored 13 points fewer over the two weeks than Tom (a point shamelessly fudged by Tess Daly). But that counted for nought in the dance-off, the result predestined, a classic case of going through the motions.
How judges Shirley Ballas, Motsi Mabuse and Craig Revel Horwood sat there and doled out a judgment transparently handed down from the producers booth without slipping a disc – or whatever Strictly curse you care to invoke for doing a tango with the truth – beggared belief. “Due to musicality,” blathered Ballas to hushed disbelief. Anton du Beke voted to save Dean, oddly the one note of sanity in the whole sorry spectacle.
This was a result up there with the premature ejection of JLS’s Aston Merrygold back in in 2017 for its blatant injustice. There’s a sense that the flamboyant plaudits being handed out to Aston’s bandmate JB Gill, an early front runner in this series, is a belated attempt to redress the balance. But sorry Strictly, it’s been seven years but that scar will never heal.
But back to 2024: can I have some of whatever the music director is on because the choices get more bizarre by the week – and not just for the celebrity dances, though the brainstorming that came up with Fat Les’s Vindaloo followed by Blur’s Parklife as the ideal soundtrack for the swoons of the American smooth must have been long and extravagantly boozy.
That was topped this Sunday’s opening mash-up of two classics – Prince’s When Doves Cry and New Order’s Blue Monday – performed as a gothic pantomime spin on Game of Thrones, starring the aforementioned Revel Horwood as a kind of drag Goldilocks. Sacrilege doesn’t begin to cover it.
So, well done Strictly, the mix of an absurd result and crackpot music has put the show, albeit a tad shakily, back on the front foot.