It’s week 2 of Strictly Come Dancing and the BBC has deemed it wise to do another 2 shows this week, making the remaining 8 starting contestants dance Ballroom on Friday and Latin on Saturday.
Toughest series ever, remember?In any case it seems to become toughest series ever for the BBC, who received over 5000 complaints last week. A couple of hundred of them were about X-Factor and Strictly being on at roughly the same time, the resty of them were about Alesha Dixon. Poor Alesha rubbed a lot of people the wrong way last week when she started out as “the new Arlene” and chose to keep a low profile with just a couple of comments about the contestants’ efforts. This friday Bruce Forsythe told Alesha that the whole crew wished her good luck for the whole series after mentioning that she’d had a tough and “unfair” week. Alesha kept a brave face and stepped up her game, making more comments about technique and posture.
Top of the leaderboard on both Friday and Saturday was Hollyoaks’ Ricky Whittle, dancing with Natalie Lowe. Cricketer Phil Tufnell surprised everyone with his efforts on Friday. Partnered by new dancer Katya Virshilas, who has trained Richard Gere and Antonio Banderas, he scored 29 points for their waltz. They passed this week with flying colours, unlike Craig Kelly with Flavia Cacace and Richard Dunwoody with Lilia Kopylova who had to compete in the dance-off. But before that announcement was made, we got treated to a performance by Jamie Cullum, for which they had somehow managed to set the microphone levels totally wrong, leaving the viewers at home to mainly enjoy Jamie’s backing singers instead of Jamie himself.
Craig and Richard both looked out of their depth on the dancefloor but Richard seemed to enjoy himself most while dancing. This could not help him, however, as Craig’s fighting spirit saved him from being sent off.
Next week don’t bother to tune into Strictly on Friday. From now on there will only be one show a week, on the Saturday, going on for a whopping 2 hours. And yes, it will clash with X-Factor. If you’ve got a problem with that, just phone the BBC. Or maybe buy yourself a videorecorder instead.