How judges Shirley Ballas, Motsi Mabuse and Craig Revel Horwood sat there and doled out a judgment transparently handed down from the producers booth without slipping a disc – or whatever Strictly curse you care to invoke for doing a tango with the truth – beggared belief. “Due to musicality,” blathered Ballas to hushed disbelief. Anton du Beke voted to save Dean, oddly the one note of sanity in the whole sorry spectacle.
This was a result up there with the premature ejection of JLS’s Aston Merrygold back in in 2017 for its blatant injustice. There’s a sense that the flamboyant plaudits being handed out to Aston’s bandmate JB Gill, an early front runner in this series, is a belated attempt to redress the balance. But sorry Strictly, it’s been seven years but that scar will never heal.
But back to 2024: can I have some of whatever the music director is on because the choices get more bizarre by the week – and not just for the celebrity dances, though the brainstorming that came up with Fat Les’s Vindaloo followed by Blur’s Parklife as the ideal soundtrack for the swoons of the American smooth must have been long and extravagantly boozy.
That was topped this Sunday’s opening mash-up of two classics – Prince’s When Doves Cry and New Order’s Blue Monday – performed as a gothic pantomime spin on Game of Thrones, starring the aforementioned Revel Horwood as a kind of drag Goldilocks. Sacrilege doesn’t begin to cover it.
So, well done Strictly, the mix of an absurd result and crackpot music has put the show, albeit a tad shakily, back on the front foot.