Strictly: Week Eight

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we’re off to Blackpool!

Am I the only one who hears the word ‘Blackpool’ and thinks of Craig Kelly? I feel like I’m stuck in some infernal time-loop! Thankfully, Mr Kelly isn’t in this week’s show. Say what you like about Anne Widdecombe, but at least you can laugh at her. Craig made me want to hide behind the sofa for the first time since I encountered the Daleks on my screen in the mid 1970s...

Talking of the 1970s, we seem to have taken a trip back to the decade of flares, spangles and glam rock. For some reason Tess Daly decided the big occasion merited dressing as a member of ‘Brotherhood Of Man’, resplendent in a scarlet cat suit with shoulder frills. Was this the new gimmick, I wondered? Was this week’s addition of Strictly going to be loosely themed on ‘Charlie’s Angles?’

Unfortunately not.

I say unfortunately, because it may have enlivened proceedings a little. Blackpool is without doubt the historic, dare one say spiritual, home of ballroom dancing – but that doesn’t mean it translates well to the small screen. If anything the vast floor space and distance of the audience simply makes the spectacle remote, almost cold, compared to the television studio venue. I understand that “making it to Blackpool” is seen as a minor landmark but rather than enhance the contest, it feels to me like the Blackpool venue is shoehorned in for the sake of it. Subsequently, my impressions of the actual dances may be slightly skewed by my general lack of enthusiasm for the Blackpool venue, but I will give my honest opinions regardless of whether they have any substance in actuality!

There was a fair bit to like about Patsy’s samba – most of it down to her performance levels. She did manage to convince us she was a frisky show-girl, and whilst I liked the colour combination of pink and black, and I liked the style of the dress, the two somehow managed to come together in a very odd fashion indeed. I don’t know if they used real satin or not but you have to be a twiglet to carry shiny fabric off convincingly, and as Patsy is a normal looking woman with real curves the dress ended up making her look slightly ‘Mavis Cruet’.

Nobody doubts Patsy’s acting: her ability to sell a dance has actually been one of the highlights of this year for me. But technically she’s not quite up to the level of some, and this comparison is becoming more and more heightened as the weeks progress. Samba is notoriously difficult to master as it has so many components to it, and there were times when Patsy didn’t quite remember which bits should bounce, and when! The errors were noticeable and of course the judges spotted them, but the routine was fun and fairly inoffensive, and travelled around the vast room nicely enough. Just one point, though. I’m getting the impression that Patsy feels Craig is picking on her. Patsy: he picks on everyone if he feels they’ve not done well enough! In this respect he’s not being remotely personal, and I wish Patsy would just put it behind her and move on. Because she’s most likely only got a few weeks left in the show at most.

Kara’s American Smooth was odd. I say odd, but I mean it in a good way! I loved how innovative it was considering the hideously unsuitable piece of music that they had. I did wonder about the dark dress that Kara was wearing before the start as it didn’t cry American Smooth to me, and as soon as the almost tangoesque feel kicked in at the start I could imagine Len’s nails being stuck into the palms of his hands. Being a traditionalist, only the elegance and glamour concept of the AS will suffice for him. Remember ‘zigzaggate’ in 2006 when Mark and Karen danced a very nice AS, and Len sat there with a face that suggested he’d been given a bowl of mouse droppings instead of muesli for breakfast? Peppered with zigzags??? I would have peppered him with so many damned zigzags he wouldn’t have been able to sit down on his pickled walnuts for a month...

Predictably, whether right or wrong, Len did his narna again. And the thing is that I can see his point of view, but that dance by Kara and Artem was so lovely that for once – just for once – I wanted him to let it go and give them the good score they deserved. It was such a passionate, dramatic and powerful interpretation of the AS that it almost defied criticism, and yet because it didn’t appear to have either the traditional foxtrot base or the alternative quickstep base (it looked like it had a tango/Paso appearance) it must have been difficult to know how to score it. Personally, I thought it pretty much sublime.

I went through a period within the first few weeks of not thinking that Kara was good enough to win the contest, but over the last three weeks I have completely revised my opinion. As of this moment, she’s not only good enough to win, but I think she deserves to.

Matt Baker annoys me. He annoys me because I am desperate to like him. He’s a cat’s whisker from making me like him. But every time I find myself thinking “wow!” he goes and does something that makes me think “you utter twonk” and my opinions of him sink again. Take the samba, for instance. That was a difficult samba from a technical point of view. It looked complicated and stuffed full of intricate moves. He shook his thing like a total diva. It was very off-putting to see him in a shirt that looked frankly as if Ramps had worn it a few series ago, but that didn’t stop me from thinking it a great little routine...until those bloody awful back-flips and round-offs. STOP WITH THE GYMNASTICS ALREADY!!! We know you can do it! This is not Strictly Gymnastics, and I can only assume that these were put in to shamelessly get votes on account of being such a clever-clogs. On this occasion I have to agree with Len: what the *beep* has gymnastics got to do with the samba?!? It makes me so terribly disappointed to see it because, let’s face it, the boy can dance...there’s just no need to shoehorn those moves in.

And he’s still clenching his jaw when he dances! Craig may have got him to sort his thumbs out but what I want is to see someone bandage his chin, because it’s driving me nuts!

Felicity Kendall looked – and danced – the best she has on the show to date. And you just know that’s going to be curtains for her. You can see her on the ITT couch come Monday, with Claudia saying “it must be a bitter sweet feeling to have to go out on your best dance”. The usual sort of guff that gets flung the way of somebody who is quite clearly not good enough to win but certainly not bottom of the pile. Because let’s face it, Anne is made of Bakelite and is clearly not going anywhere soon, leaving the likes of Felicity and Gavin dangerously exposed.

The pale pink dress was absolutely stunning, I have to say, but I personally don’t think the American Smooth is Vincent’s dance somehow. Again, more faffing about at the start, and every now and again Felicity seemed to rely on Vincent to get her into position, but as Len is so fond of saying, she’d “come out and done a good job.” Certainly it was a very traditional American Smooth, and I found myself liking it for none of the reasons that I liked in Kara’s! I think it suffered slightly from being swallowed up by the vastness of the room, as it never especially seemed to travel especially, but both Vincent and Felicity handled the lifts really well. But does she have the public support? The fact she’s previously been in the bottom two suggests otherwise.

Someone who clearly does have support, although what they see in him I still don’t quite get, is Gavin Henson. After last week’s vast improvement, Gavin sank once more into the depths like a weighted anchor. I think he needs hypnosis, frankly. You can see it in his eyes: one minute he’s having a laugh, the next he’s terrified and looks like he’s impaled himself on a toasting fork. The constant zoning back and forth between one state of mind and the other makes me feel very uncomfortable watching him. Of course, anyone who has ever had to do anything in public will have a degree of sympathy for him, but the simple fact is he probably isn’t on a par with Kara, Matt and Scotttttttttt.

His American Smooth was slightly controversial, in that I didn’t feel the lifts added anything to the performance at all. In fact the first one was so out of place that he could well have been holding Katya up to the ceiling so that she could change a light bulb. The good news is that at least he has learned to smile and engage with the audience at long last, so some things from last week have carried forward, but the shaping of his hands were most unpleasant, to the extent where I expected Craig to run on to the floor with a chainsaw and cut them off!

Mind you, that would have made the remaining lifts a bit difficult.

Scott never looked confident in his samba VTs throughout the week. The hips didn’t look convincing, the bounce didn’t look bouncy enough, and I don’t think his height actually helped much. I know Zoe Ball was built like a giraffe in heels and yet still danced the ultimate Strictly samba, but there’s no doubting that tall people don’t quite look as good on the eye doing samba rolls and Voltas, and this awkwardness periodically manifested itself during the dance. Of course the main problem for me was that they chose ‘Higher and Higher’ to dance to, and as all good Rampants know this was the tune that was used for the Dawson/Ramprakash ‘Judges Choice’ face-off. Ramps on that occasion chose to do samba, so there’s this direct comparison in my mind. And Scott, much as I love you, I’m afraid your samba didn’t come close! I did however prefer the routine to Matt’s, as there wasn’t any sign of interstellar-flipflops-with-short-back-and-side-nuclearplasmic-somersualts added in to the mix.

Pamela and James looked like they had the most fun of the night. Having been told by the judges to go forth and multiply, sorry...indulge in some on-screen hanky panky, they gave their American Smooth every bit of welly they could throw at it, and a bit more. I’ve never really seen a pantomime AS before but this was what it reminded me of, with everything larger than life and exaggerated. To be honest I didn’t know if I should sit in awe at the whole playfulness of the choreography or think “hmm...this feels a little contrived.” But I give Pam extra kudos for dancing in a dress that made her look like a sardine in a squashed can. It’s the happiest I’ve seen James in all his years on Strictly as well, and even although I’m not sure the routine was a 10, I’m happy that she bagged two of the blighters!

Well, somehow Anne got to go last again. Dressed from head to foot in canary yellow and looking for all the world as if Big Bird from Sesame Street had plopped in to the tower ballroom, Anne (for t’was she) rounded proceedings off in a style reminiscent of those brown things with the long ears and a leg in each corner that take kids for rides on the beach. There was precious little samba content in the routine, mostly because Anne deemed it far too raunchy, and so the sanitised routine that we got basically involved Anne standing still whilst Anton wriggled around her. There was a very nice ‘pogo’ movement in the middle where Anton grabbed Anne’s foot and she hoped up and down like a space hopper, but in every other sense it was back to the usual Laurel and Hardy routine. Now, whilst I maintain Anne has every right to be in the contest I do take umbrage when contestants refuse to actually do certain moves crucial to the dance because they’re not seemly enough. It’s a samba, for goodness sake not a tea dance! What we got was more of a sham-ba, and I fully supported Craig in giving her a 1!

So, an unusual end to a rather lacklustre evening as far as I was concerned. Kara was the stand-out for me, with Matt (barring the ghastly circus routine) and Pamela my next favourites. Other than Anne it was Gavin who seemed the least affective, but I think a combination of her invincibility and his muscles will just about see them safe.

Watch out Felicity, is all I can say.