Wallowing in the cosy entertainment of Strictly Come Dancing has been a staple Saturday evening ritual for millions during the autumn months of the past 20 years. For the BBC, it’s a prized cash cow, having been exported (under the Dancing with the Stars brand) to around 60 other countries.
It’s a show built on schmaltz and competition as celebrities (mostly with no dance experience) are paired with professional dancers in a weekly gladiatorial contest where one couple is routinely eliminated by a mix of public vote and the imperial thumbs-down from the judges.
It’s a self-inflicted recipe for tough love in the rehearsal room
Preparing for the twentieth anniversary (although this autumn will see the 22nd series), the BBC’s flagship show has become mired in a controversy of its own making. Two Italian male professionals – Giovanni Pernice and Graziano Di Prima – have been dropped following allegations about their training methods.
In October 2023, Pernice’s celebrity partner, Amanda Abbington, pulled out of the show, citing personal reasons. Seven months’ later, the law firm, Carter Ruck, announced that it had contacted the BBC regarding ‘numerous serious complaints’ about Pernice’s alleged behaviour while performing Strictly. Adding fuel to this fire, another former partner of Pernice, the ex-Love Island host Laura Whitmore said that the experience made her ‘…really broken, both mentally and physically…’. Pernice has rejected ‘any suggestion of abusive or threatening behaviour’.
On 16 July 2024, the programme’s cosy image was further tarnished when TV presenter Zara McDermott posted a statement that she had found aspects of her time with Di Prima on the 2023 season to have been ‘incredibly distressing to watch’ and that she had delayed going public with allegations about his training methods because she was ‘scared of victim shaming’. In response, Di Prima acknowledged that his ‘intense passion and determination to win might have affected my training regime’.
And therein lies the rub. Largely amateur dancers are pressed into an intensely competitive environment where, week-by-week, they have to learn increasingly complex techniques that seasoned professionals will have taken thousands of hours to master. Each Saturday they are thrust in front of a TV audience to succeed or humiliate themselves: if the latter, the fault will be seen to lie with their professional partner. Adding to this intensity, the professional’s fee will increase as the show moves on (reportedly from an initial £25,000 up to four times as much if their partner wins). It’s a self-inflicted recipe for tough love in the rehearsal room.
This controversy is nothing new for dance. Ironically, the BBC ran a Panorama investigation, last September, about the toxic culture of body-shaming and bullying in UK ballet schools. But they couldn’t see the same methods allegedly taking place for their own programme in pursuit of creating work worthy of the judges’ ‘10’ paddle.
It’s also a problem that has been around for years. Rehearsal footage of former Strictly professional, James Jordan (who left the show in 2013) has emerged from 2006, in which he humorously body-shames his partner, Georgina Bouzová. In a sign of how the times have changed, this footage wasn’t even secret. It was aired on the spin-off programme It Takes Two. Bouzová laughingly refers to Jordan calling her ‘chubby’. Elsewhere he is filmed referring to her ‘fat belly’. Eighteen years later, the edited footage seems inappropriate, but at the time Jordan’s ‘antics’ merited only a mild rebuke by the presenter Claudia Winkelman. After the pair were voted off, Jordan was robustly defended by Bouzová who said: ‘He is lovely and we’ve had such a laugh, we really have’.
No similar allegations have been levelled against any female professional. They have won the glitter ball trophy twelve times against nine successes by their male counterparts, which suggests that it’s possible to guide celebrity dancers to success without the need for rancour. It’s also important to note that there were no such allegations after Pernice won the show in 2021 with Rose Ayling-Ellis (perhaps winning is the key?).
Many of the relationships between male professionals and their female celebrities are enduring, none more so than that of Countdown‘s Rachel Riley and her partner Pasha Kovalev who danced together in 2013. Eleven years and two children later, they remain happily married.
Dance training is under the microscope all over the western hemisphere (body shaming is still rife in Eastern Europe). The cult-like culture of Strictly has been drawn into that controversy and the BBC has responded by announcing that chaperones will be present in all future rehearsals although former professional, Kristina Rhianoff, has said that members of production staff were always there for ‘every single second of rehearsals’ so it seems a redundant gesture.
Strictly’s enduring popularity will ensure that it wobbles through this crisis and a few million people will sit by their firesides to enjoy the upcoming season. In recent years, the show has replicated the excessive sentimentality of other reality TV series and it could even be that tough treatment in the rehearsal room will become yet another ingredient of that schmaltz – I can easily imagine a judge saying, ‘look at what she had to endure in rehearsals and what a performance she delivered’! Anything for ratings.
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