Strictly: Week Nine

There are only seven contenders left, folks! And I for one am delighted!

It’s not that I haven’t enjoyed this year’s Strictly, although I’m not about to call it a vintage year (even if there are some good dancers left in the show). However, when it starts to head towards December I like to feel as if I’m rooting for someone specific, regardless of whether they eventually make the final or not. This year, to be honest, I don’t give a fig who gets to the end. In a way that’s fairly refreshing (not to mention stress-free). My phone bill is certainly a lot healthier than it was a few years back...

I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve fallen out of love with the show, even if I have been critical of some of the DWTS rules that have been brought in. I’m just sort of glad that we are in the final stages now, where the wheat is sorted from the chaff (with the exception of the eternal Anne Widdecombe), and the real contenders are there at the end. Maybe I’ll be able to form some sort of definite opinion of them all as we head towards the final.

Kara drew the short straw this week and started first, although this has never stopped her from doing well in the past. Today it felt a bit like a regression. The jive needs so much energy, fire and drive that it can be difficult to master from a performance side of things, let alone the technical side. Today Kara managed for the most part to get the technique spot on but once again it doesn’t matter how skilful you are at placing your arms when it results in losing the energy of the dance. It was the most clinical jive I’ve seen, and it looked a little too beautiful for me, as if Kara was dancing with her feet but not her heart. Still, a fabulous routine if a little sterile and antiseptic, but nice to see Artem able to dance considering the horrific neck crunch he suffered last week. And Kara’s silver foil dress was amazing!

From the sublime to the...er, submarine! Certainly the Widdecombe rumba had a nautical flavour to it, with Anne playing the unlikely roll of Kate Winslet to Anton’s Leo DiCaprio in the most unbelievable recreation of Titanic that you will ever see. I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t laugh at it, even if I felt I probably shouldn’t. There were basic rumba steps in the routine although they seemed to have mutated into something only vaguely recognisable, as if some hideous experiment had gone amiss in the laboratory and escaped into the television sets of the nation. When Craig said that the artificial iceberg prop in the centre of the floor was the best thing, he wasn’t actually mistaken. But again, I think Anton has to get considerable credit here for managing to come up with a routine that doesn’t attempt to cover how awful a dancer Anne is, but embraces the fact and turns it into comedy gold!

I feel almost dirty for typing that, though. There’s a part of me that feels I should be protesting along with all the others on Digital Spy that it’s “a dance contest”, and that Anne subsequently has no real business still being there. I feel I should be up on the roof of television centre chucking fire extinguishers at the producers of the show. And yet I still found Anne entertaining, so what high ground can I take?

My mum (who is a big fan of Anton and his deranged chest hair) is incandescent with rage that Anne keeps getting through. I’m not sure if that’s because she hates seeing better dancers knocked out each week whilst the right honourable Widdie keeps coming back like a particularly pernicious garden weed, or whether it’s her inbuilt Scottish belief that Conservative MPs, ex or otherwise, are the spawn of the devil. The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between. But democracy allows people (or ‘morons’ as my mother kindly referred to them) to vote for Anne, and until some serious coffee sniffing is done by the public we will just have to hold our collective heads in our hands, sigh, and pretend that we didn’t enjoy Anne’s latest attempts to string two recognisable steps together...

Patsy almost fell into the same category as Kara earlier in the show, in that the look of the dance was realised but the essence - the soul - was missing. The only difference was that Kara has technique to fall back on if the performance doesn’t quite come off, and whilst Patsy has got better she doesn’t have the same presence that Kara projects. She certainly looked the business, but her Argentine Tango seemed to lack that killer ‘black widow’ venom. The dancing is expressed through the legwork, but that doesn’t mean that the face should be left a complete blank! I think this is the reason I still have Mark and Karen’s AT at the top of the pile after all these years: the acting, subtle as it was, remains sublime.

The footwork was okay, the spins were very nicely done indeed, and she’s light years better than she was week one, but to me she’s got to be favourite to go along with Gavin. It’s got to the stage where those two are in danger of being left behind and they are now beginning to run out of weeks in which to really make the judges sit up and go ‘wow!’ It was a nice dance, but the AT isn’t about being nice...

Scott looked half asleep in his training vids. He looked half asleep on the dance floor as well. He must have known that doing Strictly and EastEnders at the same time would be a momentous ask but I guess nobody really appreciates how much effort Strictly requires until they start. Poor Scott is beginning to look downright unwell. He has my sympathy: my SAD has kicked in big time and fatigue is something I have to live with all day and night. But I imagine all the contestants on Strictly are beginning to feel exhaustion kick in now.

In the past Scott has sometimes made small, almost insignificant errors, but mostly the low marks he has received over the weeks has been a result of simply not gelling with the dance. Rumba is a killer dance for men to do, and samba can really sort the boys from the men if you feel embarrassed about shaking your hips. Today however should have been a dance tailor made for Scott, but his American Smooth was reduced to an American swamp through the amount of errors he managed to make. I can only assume that he was simply going through the motions of dancing, and that his feet were trying to lead him to where they ought to be at that moment, but whatever the truth he looked a rather pale shadow of his former self. Steps were forgotten, his posture didn’t look as sharp as it once did, and whilst it wasn’t quite ‘Night of the Living Dead’, there was a great deal more zombie to this routine than there was for his superb Viennese Waltz in Halloween week!

A word about the scoring: it was bonkers tonight. I’m not picking on Scott, but he was grossly over marked by the gruesome twosome on the right of the judge’s panel. Various other people were debatably given too many points but this instance stands out for me because there were palpably so many things wrong with it that even Mole from Wind in the Willows could have seen it wearing a broken pair of specs!

Oh dear. Gallumping Gavin has struck again. Another jive; although this time I will not compare it to Kara’s dance, because to do so would be like trying to compare stale Rivita to a large Chocolate Éclair with extra cream. It’s unfortunate that Gavin has got a dance he really dislikes (okay, hates) straight after a dance that he screwed up last week, but you could tell he wasn’t enjoying the jive from the first few out of synch kicks that he did. There were timing issues, it was a tad stompy, it didn’t flow as a dance, and I felt that the routine was repetitive. Gavin may have thought it was worth more than the judges gave it but to be honest I felt he was lucky to get what he did. I honestly enjoyed Anne’s routine more, even through splayed fingers. If anyone needed a lifejacket tonight it was Gavin...

Matt should have no problems reaching the final, even if his effort today wasn’t up to his usual standards. Why? Because two people called ‘Matt’ have already danced in Strictly and they both made it to the end of the competition in their respective years. Although come to think of it, they both came second. Hard luck Mr Baker!

Seriously, short of doing an ‘Austin’ he deserves to be there. He’s a pretty decent all round dancer when it comes to Latin and ballroom. Scott is better at ballroom than Latin. If the pair of them make the final without Scott falling asleep on the job, my money would be on Matt because his Latin dances have more ‘wow’ to them, which usually gets the voters picking up the phone. That’s not to say that Matt doesn’t have things all his own way: tonight being a case in point.

In the words of Topol, I would like at this moment to sing “TRADITION!” at the top of my voice. Not just on a whim, either. American Smooth has to, for me, evoke Hollywood glamour. It has to have style, sophistication, elegance...the man has to look dapper and the woman Hepburneque. I want to be drawn in by the tones of Sinatra, or Crosby, or Nat King Cole. What I don’t expect to see is a bloke in an open necked red Latin shirt dancing some freaky hybrid dance! I’m growing like Len, I admit it. Before you know it I’ll be pickling the walnuts I don’t have! My real problem, aside from the odd feel of the routine (and I’m blaming the aforementioned DWTS influence that’s been creeping in to the choreography this season), is that Matt overworks at times, and something that should be a simple, beautiful move becomes frantic and displaced. The Viennese waltz section of the routine was the guiltiest, with Matt running around in a circle like a little hamster on an invisible wheel!

Hammy...sorry, Matt is still dancing with a Desperate Dan jaw as well. It’s not pretty, and instantly ruins the believability of the dance. In fact I am now watching for it, so I do wish he’d stop looking so intense! Bruno picked up on something I said a few weeks back: that the intensity with which Matt dances makes him look like a mad serial killer! But, let us be fair to Matt here: you can’t really fault his footwork, which remained classy and stylish. He and Kara are the standouts this year.

When I first saw Pamela’s dance I thought it was pretty special. Having seen it again I still think it’s pretty gosh-darned good, but I can see a few errors that I didn’t initially see in my initial enthusiasm for the routine. Now, I like a good Charleston: mostly because it’s the only dance I can do! Pamela’s enthusiasm in this competition is unmatched, and whilst there are clearly some who are more skilled technically, she certainly sells a routine better than anyone else on the show. Today’s dance was perhaps slower paced than most Charleston’s we’ve seen recently, yet it worked for the most part, and although there were one or two balance issues and fractional wobbles to insure that it wasn’t perfect, it was a good solid nine out of ten for me. I do not like the amount of props at the start of James’ routines though; he’s much cleverer than that, unless he’s subliminally telling Pamela that at 61 ‘granny’ needs to spend the first 15 seconds sitting down on a chair! Again, Alesha and Bruno handed out the tens, which was frankly baffling, although it was in my opinion the best dance of the night.

By and large, I agreed with the leader board even if the scoring was frankly deranged at times. It puts Patsy and Gavin in a rather dangerous spot, because Anne is in it to win it and her fans (shadowy, sinister alien beings from the planet ‘Peculiar’) are not going to stop voting for her until that glitter ball is welded to Anton’s mantelpiece. Sleepy Scott’s fans will ring in like crazy to save his comatose neck, Matt and Kara have a fan base that will most likely see them to the final, and Pamela in first place should be safe for another week at least.

So, the ‘slow improver’ or the ‘irretrievably orange’ one? Tune in to the results show to find out (or cheat and look on Digital Spy like the rest of the fanatics)...