There’s a Radio 4 programme, presented by the smug moraliser Marcus Brigstocke, called I’ve Never Seen Star Wars, which gets famous people to do things they’ve never done before, like watch Star Wars. I’m not famous, but before last night I’d never seen Strictly. The very idea of it bored me. I don’t like ballroom dancing, I don’t like sequins or kitsch or seventies nostalgia, I don’t like programmes starring celebrities I’ve never heard of doing silly things because they desperately need the money. I don’t get the semi-ironic personality cult around ‘Brucie’, a man without any obvious charm or talent, apart from being the only 20th-century light entertainer who’s not dead or behind bars.
I do however quite like his replacement Claudia Winklemann. Not that I’d ever seen her present anything before last night, but I’d read interviews with her in broadsheets and she seemed nice and fairly clever. I felt sorry for her when people made fun of her freakish makeup, and sympathised with her blazing insecurities. Presumably having two women presenters (Tess Daly is still around) was a ploy to win back all those feminists who stopped watching Strictly after Arlene Philips was booted out. It doesn’t work. Not because they’re women, but because they’ve got no chemistry. Daly is dull, and Winklemann kind of awkward. It was unclear why they’d been put together, apart from one being blonde and the other brunette.
Does Strictly employ any writers? It was crying out for some banter, some light double entendres. Especially because the celebs are such barrel scrapings. I can see the appeal of watching Ann Widdecombe dance, or John Sergeant – but even the joke contestants this year are dullards. Some bow-tied man from Bargain Hunt, Gregg Wallace, Judy Murray (fresh from the worst Desert Island Discs in living memory). Otherwise it’s just some people you’re not interested in learning how to dance. And there wasn’t even much of that. This first episode was all about pairing up the contestants with their rictus-grinning dance partners, predicting who’s going to fall victim to the programme’s famous ‘curse’.
I realise that judging Strictly solely on the basis of its tenth series is a bit like judging Woody Allen on Midnight in Paris, or Martin Amis on… actually his new book’s supposed to be ok, isn’t it. But seriously, who are the 11 million people who enjoy this stuff? That’s more than a sixth of the population. The only thing that would make me watch another another episode is if Scotland get independence and Judy Murray has to dance for her right to stay in the UK.
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