Strictly Come America

The holy grail of TV shows these days is not just to make a domestic hit, but to devise a formula which can be successfully sold overseas. TV shows these days have more of a tendency to have related spin offs, not just “behind the scenes” type shows such as “The X-Tra Factor”, but extensions of the brand – “Junior Masterchef Australia” anyone? The BBC has an entire arm dedicated to exploiting its brands, BBC Worldwide, which you’ve quite possibly never heard of, as they are quite discrete within the UK.

When it isn’t trying to teach to world to cook, BBC Worldwide is encouraging celebrities with two-left feet to get up and shaky their booty on an altogether artificial dance floor. The juggernaut that is “Strictly Come Dancing”, or, as it is known practically everywhere else “Dancing with the Stars” (DWTS), continues to be a twice yearly feature of American TV, and Season 14 has just started. Such is the insanity of the TV import/export business, and in a move which would make Del Boy exclaim that you can indeed sell coals to Newcastle, that sometimes you can watch the US seasons of DWTS on “Watch”, a UK satellite and cable channel. It’s insanely popular* amongst the Watch audience, but the powers that be at Watch, which is itself partially owned by BBC Worldwide, and who presumably get both “first dibs” and a discount on the price, aren’t showing the current series. Now presumably, their reasoning for this is that this series has a relatively low number of “people the Brits will have heard of”, but I’m not sure that’s why people are watching. Much as with Strictly, which has become as much about the pro-dancers as the celebs, I think the same thing has happened with DWTS, at least for the UK audience. I was genuinely upset when I heard that Lacey Schwimmer wasn’t going to do this season, and conversely very pleased when I heard that both Maxsim and Val Chmerkovskiy were going to be pros this season.

Also, the “not enough people the Brits haven’t heard of” argument flies out of the window in the face of Gladys Knight, Martina Navratilova and Katherine Jenkins – AN ACTUAL BRIT. Plus, several of the pros have a strong connection to the UK; Mark Ballas has a British mother, and grew up here. Derek Hough, another of the pros spent his teenage years living with the Ballas family and both of them were known to Len Goodman from Ballroom Dancing competitions before the TV show was a twinkle in an Executive Producer’s eye. Hough also previously worked with Bruno Tonioli. Bruno and Len are two of the three judges on DWTS. Tristan MacManus is the Irish representative, and seems to have been parachuted in to fill the Anton Du Beke roll of being partnered with “ladies of a certain age” – except he actually challenges them and gets good results, rather than patronising them with shite choreography. Alan Dedicoat, who narrates on Strictly, narrates on DWTS as well (I presume he’s doing it over a phone line or something). In short, there is enough “British” interest for Watch to justify a reverse deal. They’ve opted out this season though, which leaves us reliant on YouTube clips and the Wikipedia entry to find out what’s going on.

And what’s going on is that Katherine Jenkins is shaking her booty like a Valley girl possessed. Her Jive in week 2 was fantastic, and her two ballroom efforts have been superb. She should go quite a long way in the competition, assuming she doesn’t have a complete collapse of confidence and technique. Martina has served one into the net and was eliminated first. Gladys is still going. I suspect she won’t get further than half way through, as her sense of rhythm isn’t actually all that great. That’s the beauty of DWTS, people who you suspect will be good, very often aren’t, people who you may have written off surprise you with their ability.

This season has started very strongly; we’ve already had 3 Tens awarded, all in the third week of competition, 2 of them to Miss Jenkins. The season is shaping up to be a corker, and it’s a real shame that Watch won’t let the UK audience see it. They could still step in at this point, snap up the rights, have three weeks of broadcasting two episodes back to back to catch up, edit the results shows to reduce the running time and cut out the singers and bands we’ve never heard of (it’s obvious from previous seasons that they do this before we see it anyway) and to cut out some of the repetition which has to be included when you can barely get through ten minutes of air-time without an advert break.

DWTS – you should be watching the highlights on YouTube. A Brit might come good, or at the very least launch her international career, and you’d be thoroughly entertained watching her try to do it!

*yeah, that link might very well have entirely different frothing on it by the time you click through. At the point I'm typing this, 15 out of 20 posts on the front page of the forums are about why Watch aren't showing DWTS.

Strictly - The Post-Mortem

I am glad that Harry won. I would have been fine with Chelsee winning as well, as I think they were both very, very good. I think Chelsee probably had slightly harder routines overall.

I intended to post after every show, but a severe lack of time, and annoyance with the first few weeks results put me off. Edwina should not have been the first to go - Lulu "face like it has been smacked with a lemon" should have gone before her, as should Nancy, who was truly, utterly appalling. And Alex Jones should not have  been far behind them. I have no idea how Alex got as far as she did, she was poor technically for most of the dances and, to be frank, looked like she didn't want to be there until about week 6. I certainly felt that Rory and Dan, who appeared to be really trying, should have been rewarded with more opportunities to improve. Russell Grant went at about the right time - just before the public tired of him, and when they realised that as enthusiastic as he was (and boy, was he enthusiastic), he wasn't actually very good.

The Wembley show appeared to be mostly pointless, other than as an excuse to raise money for Children in Need, or more likely, suggests cynical old me, to act as an extended trailer for the forthcoming SCD Tour. Which, intriguingly, won't feature Ola and James Jordan. There seems to be a suggestion that their respective celebs couldn't make it - you can see that Alex Jones needs to be on The One Show sofa every night, and that Robbie has other fish to fry, but you'd have thought that there would have been something for them to do. The suggestions from stupid people on the Daily Mail forums who haven't read the story properly, is that they wouldn't watch the show if Ola wasn't in it, and even though they have missed the point entirely, I do wonder how much of an impact not including two very popular and technically exceptional celebs is going to have.

So, to sum up, I was pleased with the overall result, but disappointed with the elimination order. There is, I suspect, little that can be done about this, other than that the Judges fix their scores to try to put the useless people in the "danger zone" of the middle of the leader board. And I'm not sure the judges would be prepared to do that. Also, there needs to be less of Bruce's awful, awful jokes, and more of Claudia, who was mostly woefully underused this year, and missed out on the last weekend altogether. Also, a "round up" episode of It Takes Two on the Sunday evening, to interview the runner up and the winner, and show some highlights and back stage stuff, as it always feels so rushed in the final results show.

Overall then, I was happy with my "guilty pleasure" TV this year, but felt a few things could be tweaked. And Charlie Brooks was by far the best dancer, and therefore a worthy winner of the Christmas Special. And, for thelove of all that is holy, could someone give Anton someone who stands a fighting chance next year, he must be wondering who he has offended at the Beeb to get this much of a run of duds.