After Saturday night’s Strictly Halloween special aired, adorned with more sexual flourishes and crotch flashes than a pasodoble, I wonder if our once-beloved family show has finally lost its plot. In reality, he might be cursed… by his own stupidity.
What prompted judges Craig Revel Horwood and Anton Du Beke to appear in tiny pale blue babydoll dresses? Yes, they were dressing up for the spooky special as the twin sisters from The Shining, but it was downright creepy to see two men in their fifties dressed as flirty schoolgirls.
Its delve into the risqué could have been a desperate attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of more than a million viewers abandoning Strictly this season, on what should have been its glorious 20th anniversary, but it seemed more appropriate for a fetish website than for a salon competition.
Strictly Come Dancing fans have gone wild over Nikita Kuzmin, who took to the dance floor in stockings and suspenders.
But the thing didn’t stop there. Even after the ‘gropegate’, in which her professional partner Katya Jones appeared to coldly push away the hand of her partner, opera singer Go Compare Wynne Jones, their dance on Saturday included plenty of lifts in which her face was buried in her underwear.
And don’t get me started on the crotch shots. I lost count at eight when professional Vito Coppola repeatedly lifted Sarah Hadland with open arms above his head to perform his Argentine tango.
It was almost as disturbing as watching Nikita Kuzmin prank ‘celebrity’ Sam Quek as he ripped off his clothes to reveal a skimpy black basque, suspenders and stockings more appropriate for a seedy drag night at the end of Blackpool pier than for the Strictly dance floor. .
And could anyone rein in head judge Shirley Ballas, who wore a huge red wig playing Winifred Sanderson from Hocus Pocus and was so enthralled by her own awesomeness that she spoke throughout the show in the character’s ridiculous voice? It was terribly awful television. When did the judges start thinking? they Were they the real stars of the show?
Comedian Chris McCausland and his professional dance partner Dianne Buswell opened Halloween week with a samba to the Bee Gees’ disco song Stayin’ Alive. They got 26 out of 40
Which brings me to another problem: most of us had never heard of this year’s female celebrities. Gone are the days when we had big names like Jerry Hall, Esther Rantzen, Alesha Dixon, Emma Bunton, Penny Lancaster, Natasha Kaplinsky, Felicity Kendal, Lulu and Ann Widdecombe to name just a few.
Much of what is being claimed is due to Amanda Abbington’s ongoing psychodrama against her former dance partner Giovanni Pernice and the BBC, which sources say has scared away any suitable female celebrities from taking part in the 2024 series.
And now, despite having spent £250,000 investigating Amanda’s brutal treatment allegations (the most serious of which against Gio were dismissed), BBC bosses this week expect further discussions. Meanwhile, Gio tops the ratings on the Italian version of the show after his allegations forced him to leave the UK.
What prompted judges Craig Revel Horwood and Anton Du Beke to appear in tiny pale blue babydoll dresses?
What an own goal for the Beeb to lose one of its best and most popular dancers over accusations that ended up being mostly dismissed.
But this is just one of a series of scandals that have hit Strictly in recent years. Viewers have also accused the judges of manipulating the scores of celebrities they want to keep on the show, to the detriment of other better dancers. On that note, why when they have to save one of the two celebrities in the dance contest, do all the judges always back the same person?
BBC bosses led a six-month investigation into Amanda Abbington’s explosive allegations that her Strictly partner Giovanni bullied her in training.
I’m a lifelong Strictly fan who has watched the show from the beginning and even have my own Strictly fan club on Saturday nights. But the magic has disappeared from the show. The gem of a Saturday night family show has lost its shine.
Instead of watching it live, we now meet at my house for drinks and then start recording the show when it starts at 6:30 pm We only start watching one hour of its endless 150 minutes, as each episode has been become more padded than a Chesterfield sofa.
We fast-forward through all the boring parts, of which there are now so many. The episodes are littered with stupid parodies of celebrities and judges who can’t act just to make the show longer. But all we’re interested in is the dancing, the scores and Strictly’s original promise that it would be a show that would teach fans how to dance. As a result, we completed the entire show in about 30 minutes.
Now that the lineup is filled with celebrities with previous dance experience, it’s not a fair fight. This season features Love Island’s Tasha Ghouri, a professionally trained dancer, JB Gill, a former member of boy band JLS with extensive experience dancing in music videos and EastEnders’ Jamie Borthwick, who trained in performing arts with the Sylvia Young Theater School and won. the 2023 Christmas special dancing with professional Nancy Xu.
Fans don’t stand a chance, but Strictly maintains the facade that it is true to its founding principle.
The show has fallen so low that not even Claudia Winkleman’s fringes and Tess Daley’s body-hugging spandex dresses can’t save it. Neither will the increasingly irritating judges, especially attention-seekers Shirley and Motsi Mabuse, who dole out top scores to mediocre dancers like cheap confetti at a budget wedding.
Perhaps the only person who can really save Strictly is blind comedian Chris McCausland, whose odds of lifting the shiny ball are 1/3.
He introduced himself to the competition as a true amateur, saying, “My concern was that it would be a disaster, a car accident,” but that “the point of being here is to surprise people, to expose them to someone they might think would be incapable of do these things.
Despite the best efforts of the judges, who regularly place him at the bottom of the leaderboard, it’s us viewers who keep voting for Chris to vote again. Perhaps because, although he is not a perfect dancer, he embodies the original premise of the show.
How ironic that a blind man is the only one who can see what Strictly should be about.
