Strictly and the Wizard of Wos. Alesha Dixon to Joe Calzhage: “I’m impressed by how strong you wos for Kris”. There is no way an intelligent, accomplished, successful woman, and Alesha is all three, speaks so badly and lazily on national TV because she doesn’t know any better. Does it matter? Yes: well at least as much as how many pointless points she awards a professional boxer in a sequinned Lonsdale Belt self-mockingly plodding his way through an excruciatingly bad Paso Doble. This patronising nonsense isn’t street cred; it’s taking the p*ss out of the very people who admire you enough to make you rich.

If Strictly gets any longer they’ll have to introduce an interval so we can get some food and Brucie can take on some oxygen. That said there were much to admire and most of the dancers wos great.

The ‘rise’ on (gentle)mens’ trousers is the distance from crotch to waistband: or to put it anatomically - from wobbly bits to waist. The BBC’s costume department seem to have redefined the inside-leg measurement that defines this parameter as they persist in dressing the guys in trousers that appear to be looped around the ears rather than draped around the waist. Not since Simon Cowell’s Mum failed to show him where to fix a belt have so many guys looked so ill at ease and nerdy on TV: like boys in the not so distant past who entered secondary school resplendent in their first ever pair of long trousers that mums’ in their wisdom bought three sizes too large to allow for ‘growth’. Don’t even think about it – those were innocent, if cruel days.

The other mystery is the colour conundrum. In an unguarded moment I asked my two home-grown Art teacher specialists, colour co-ordinators and Colour-Wheel consultants why Brucie’s jacket and Tess’s dress could both look black while the guys’ tails looked the colour of polished horse manure. Like carefully constructing a question in my faltering French to a Parisian, the condescension in the reply was palpable and incomprehensible: something about non-reflective material and picking out the red parts of the spectrum.

Tess’s dress posed other dilemmas: looking like a coal scuttle converted into a plant-holder she wriggled her way through the show as if she’d done a ‘Lynda’ and stuck both legs through one side of her knickers. But then a garment you can hardly walk, talk or sit down in poses challenges of anatomical hydrodynamics best left on Planet Woman. For a short while I wondered whether they’d put poor 'Take-1' in the same dress twice. Liked the hair though.

Come on admit it: like us you are all sitting there now making observations like – “that shoulder’s too low”, “her core’s too loose”, “it’s all in the hold”, “no, no – lead with your heel not your toe - dummy.” We’re all judges now – guessing what paddle Craig and Co will hold up. Try it as a drinking game: pick a judge and if you don’t guess their vote correctly – down in one. If you aren’t much good at this, you’ll have the benefit of thinking the choice of the great British public on who should be in the dance-off makes some kind of rational sense. Or maybe that is the sense: all the viewers are legless by the time they vote. I have yet to meet anyone who actually admits that they vote. This year’s fun Christmas present should be the Strictly Come Dancing judge’s kit – a pack of recycled beach bats or remaindered canoe paddles, a few sequinned bin bags (cut your own holes to fit), a bag of self-adhesive mixed sequins, a couple of wire coat-hangers to be turned into earrings and a Primary school grammar book.

High spot of this week for me was when Craig, having complimented Joe on a performance so improved as to be marginally this side of well – dead; looked genuinely ready to leg it as Momma Calzhage got out of her chair apparently bent on demonstrating where baby Joe got his killer right hook from. Craigie’s smile a tad forced I thought: a bit like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a runaway beer truck. Guinness not Miller Light.

The patronising of both ‘Jo(e)’s’ continues apace and obviously works, as the implacably sentimental British public keeps saving both and refusing to participate in the same programme as Lenny-G and Co. Tuffers by the same logic, after heroic knee surgery this week, will be free to moon the audience, fall over as often as he likes and leave his core on a hook in his dressing room next week – no one will vote him off.

The battle of the Ricky’s develops with the Jet’s talent being upstaged by the welcome if unexpected growth in tricky Ricky’s showmanship. Lenny G’s thrill at something “right up my Ali” is I'm sure encouraging for her though does make one wonder whether Len thinks a double-entendre is a tricky manoeuvre in the Slow Fox Trot. We may not really know much more about the art of dancing but we are getting pretty knowledgeable about the Judges’ prejudices: Len for example hates capes in the Paso, sex and passion anywhere but the bedroom, and finger clicks anywhere at all. Craig remains however the king of the mystifying metaphor and snidey simile: Lynda apparently needing more movement having looked like a “stunned mullet” - whether fish or hair-cut he didn’t clarify: and tricky Ricky having hands like “ice-cream scoops”. Meanwhile Bruno should immediately be signed for BBC Radio 4’s Just A Minute for too long now missing the late Kenneth Williams. Talking of Kenneth Williams is it only me or does Lynda Bellingham look like him when she does her astonished open-mouth thing? Great ‘John Sargent drag’ in her Paso this week I thought but she and Nathalie really have to tip the BBC hairdressers or they’ll keep taking the Mick. I’m also getting a bit distracted by Chris Hollins looking like Ernie Wise and Jo Wood having a Wallace, of Grommit fame, smile.

Lots of hints and innuendo about extra-terpsichorean activity this week. There is such an undertow of sexual ambiguity about the whole show that it becomes a matter of delicate sensibility and good manners to refrain from wondering who does or would want to do what with whom and when or where. Perhaps, like most of the committed members of the Labour party after this week, I will have to deny myself the opportunity to keep up with this side-bar of probably carefully manufactured scandal. Mind you with the BBC’s increasing passion for self-advertisement and cross marketing, the most salacious stuff will no doubt find its way on to News 24.

So poor old Rav carries his orang-utan arms (Craig - the description not the arms) off into the sunset: a victim at least as much of Alioli’s daftly inappropriate, selfish choreography as his own pretty transparent limitations. Lynda, Nathalie, Jo-Joe and Craig look like the escapees of the week. Down to 13 next week: still my racing heart.

http://zettelfilmreviews.co.uk

I didn't see much of this as I am an X-Factor girl at heart. But I did see Rick from off-of Hollyoaks and Natalie Cassidy and couldn't stop thinking what an unfair world it is to confer so much beauty and elegance on one person and deny both those things to another.

I hated myself for laughing aloud at poor Natalie's attempts to look sexy and glamorous - she reminded me of a younger Margaret Rutherford playing Miss Marple. I know, I am a feminist and this is despicable of me, but at one point I had to stick my fist in my mouth to stop me laughing aloud.

What's wrong with Alesha? Why is everyone getting at her and voting overwhelmingly on Yahoo to get her the sack? Oh yes, because she's young and beautiful and talented. Silly me!

I don't like Alesha as a judge - I don't think she knows what she's doing. She's the Sweet One. (Her comments remind me of some of my lit crits - when it's horrible and I say something along the lines of "Very interesting, some nice imagery here" and try to get away...) And I dislike the BBC getting rid of Arlene - agism. I've watched the show with a friend for the last four or five years, and she won't watch it anymore because of treatment of Arlene.

I like Len, but Craig is my favorite judge. I think he's probably the fairest, as well as strictest, judge. Every year, I feel like the judges have favorites - the boxer, for example. Or the plump soap star. I'm not comfortable with the nastiness the judges sometimes show. However, the audience frequently reacts by voting for the person humiliated.

One of my favorite Strictly moments is John Sargeant's Paso Double. (prob. misspelled). The choreography was inspired! Now that's a professional - she took Sargeant and she used his strengths and it was great. Should have got all tens.

The show will get shorter as they eliminate people.

Jem and Vix

Thanks for the comments.

I actually like Alesha she's not technical but has a feel for some of the performance challenges the celebs face despite their experience in other fields. I just distrust the street cred crap grammar: if it's real she should have enough pride and professionlism to get it right; if it isn't she should just stop doing it and be real. It's fair to say that she's the only one on the panel you'd want to see dance. Though of course that would exclude Darcy when she turns up. Don't get that: she would have been of value from the start.

Hard to get too wound up about Arlene: there is so much ageism out there for ordinary people forced into retirement; stopped from contributing; undervalued and ignored. Arlene can still do what she does best - choreograph and work with dancers. She was the least interesting or 'entertaining' of the old panel.

Agree about Craig: except when he is just cruel and rude for the sake of the effect. He really is, sorry about the sexist term but it's the one that fits - a bitch. But the real downside of Strictly is that it turns us all into bitches in a way. Odd word 'bitch' there is no obvious 'masculine' counterpart. And it is a profoundly sexist matter that alternatives like the 'c' word are themselves perjorative uses of 'female' related words. But they have acquired a kind of general semantic 'currency' that has left the sexism behind - it seems to me.

Anyway no place to run that hare.

Thanks again for the comments. I don't do much TV and these are just fun to write. No one including me should take them too seriously. If they raise the odd smile - job done.

Z

Odd smile very much raised - as usual.
Susiex