If anyone was going to pull off having omelette on the side of their head, it was AJ Odudu.

Week 8 draws to a close and we find out who gets spared the ordeal of having 1000 theatre kids flaming their Instagram for not being an authentic enough Dolly Levi.

We start the show with SCANDAL! As it turns out Amy’s pivotal role of Remembrance Weekend Leading Lady has been stolen by the up and coming ingénue, Jowitza!

So, if Ryan Murphy is looking for his next mini-series concept, there you go. Sarah Paulson to star as Aliona who it turns out orchestrated the whole thing.
With this being the Remembrance Weekend dance, and this being a far too snarky recap blog, it doesn’t really belong and I do feel slightly uncomfortable even trying to apply humour to it but do know that I CACKLED over the fact everyone gets very sentimental and touching vignettes and then Luba has to dance out “scrabbling to find my pen while on the phone”

but don’t worry, it lead her to true love

and if you wanted another sign that That Specific Halloween Pro-dance was organised and executed on a shoestring budget, Katya was reprising her role as vintage nurse

that’s the best picture I have of it on file, I’m not watching that routine for a 15th time trying to find a better one, I only have so much mental strength.

On with the show proper, and everyone was in Maximum Formal Black except for Shirley who reserved her right as Head Judge to wear a My Twilight Years Wedding Outfit

and in her dedication to The Sunday Illusion, Tess had let her hair down but hadn’t fully managed to rid it of the gravitationally immune ponytail

shoulda just pulled a Motsi and kept the same hair Tess

Life Hacks with Motsi Mabuse.

And before we get to the results reveals, there’s an important Posterior Update

it’s the content we all crave.

And now to the first instalment of The Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery which at this point is just A Celebration of Nadiya Bychkova

EVERYONE TAKE NOTES.
And the first couple in the Dance Off is…

I guess Discotine Tangos aren’t a hit going forward then.
As for the advice to Sara, Anton just wants more of a ~Performance~ out of Sara which is some admirably vague advice because he clearly hadn’t expected to be giving her advice this evening

From the safe couples we learn that Rhys is unsurprisingly given the honour of dancing The Musicals Week Jive – the most shocking thing about it is that it isn’t yet another Hairspray one, DAMN YOU TILLY RAMSAY! And just the thought of Rhys going from The Charleston to The Jive has quite frankly exhausted me. I am curious what this means for his Post-Musicals Week run though considering he’s burnt through quite a few of the big fun dances of the series quite early on and with critiques centring mostly around “Aren’t you a great West End potential?” I have a feeling that Rhys is only useful to the show up until next weekend and then they’ll bus the two of them off on a rumba that looks like a stork trying to do yoga.
Rose and Giovanni are apparently doing a Quickstep to Love Is an Open Door from Frozen, which Giovanni does very quickly specify is an Anna song because I’m sure every fake Frozen fan was expecting a reprisal of the Off-brand Frozen Tango

I would be ok with that though. But Giovanni has to be Anna

Kai as Optional Extra Elsa.
As for Dan and Nadiya, he’s just happy to still be there with his legacy of inspiring men to dance at weddings with an open bar. No routine reveal from them but I’m guessing The Book of Mormon is a no go?

And then it’s time for a performance from James Blunt, a man who embodies the energy of a greyhound standing in the window of a front room waiting for their owner to get home

and yes he is performing the only song anyone knows him for and yes, Graziano and Luba are indeed contempowafting at an 11 around him

have we fallen into Kai Widdrington’s temporal wormhole (snort) and ended up in 2004? Why are we inviting people onto Strictly Come Dancing, a show with a VAST audience, for artists to do their back catalogue? I’m not exactly expecting Taylor Swift in her Re-Tayloring Era to stop by but you know… something a little more current would be lovely.

And now to find out who’s joining Sara in the bottom 2 and who might finally be joining Nadiya in Safety Sex Face glory:

A nice level of excitement from Amy, I imagine having the bookies claiming you’re the favourites to leave (how they came to that decision with Giovanna Fletcher on a book flogging tour de force I don’t know) will get you down. JOHN LOOK TO CAMERA YOU COWARD.
And so, it’s between AJ & Kai or Tilly & Nikita…

IT WAS HER BIRTHDAY WEEK, HOW COULD YOU?
It’s up to Shirley to give her some helpful Dance Off advice and Shirley is CLEARLY pissed off about this bottom two combo

or perhaps it was just her stern motherly instincts kicking in over Nikita’s awkwardly hovering hand after a reassuring cuddle gone wrong

the cogs whirring in that beautiful, beautiful face of his as he gauges whether he can move out of this without drawing more attention to his greatest mistake – the whole thing is intensely Milk Nightclub Meme

We are still falling just short of the “Girlboss” title with Tilly being dubbed “a woman on a mission” and is just told to not make mistakes and to hold her frame a little higher, which as far as advice goes, went down better with Tilly and Nikita than Anton’s pat offerings last week.

From the safe couples we get that AJ is being dealt a Week 9 lob with a Waltz to Edelweiss, but as dull a routine as I fear that might be I do look forward to finally having a better pop culture image of Edelweiss than Hollie Steel’s infamous Britain’s Got Talent debacle. A moment that will haunt me forever.
And we also get that John’s sister, Victoria, has clout chased her way to getting 10% off her sausages at the local butchers – it’s been 8 weeks since John started Strictly, that’s some real dedication to a mild discount from a small business.
No word from Tom and Amy as to what their routine will be so there’s still hope for me to manifest that If I Only Had a Brain Charleston for the two of them. THROW ME A BONE STRICTLY GODS, Amy has the Dorothy outfit ready to go

sorry to keep bringing this routine up.
I’ve also just noticed Pinocchio’s admirable demi-Elvis quiff? It’s the routine that keeps on giving and simultaneously dealing me immense psychic damage.

Before we get to The Dance Off we get a Musicals Week trailer where everyone wore top hats, imaginable to evoke a sense of Chorus Line glamour but everyone very much landed in Magic Act touring the bingo halls of Britain. And how dare they tease me with The Amazing Rose and her Glamorous Assistant with the full knowledge that we’re not going to get The Amazing Rose and her Glamorous Assistant next week

although their magic act energy was nothing compared to Dan who looks like he’s preparing to saw Nadiya in half at a moment’s notice

and Nikita apparently refused the magician cosplay and instead dressed up as Sara

that was rude but she does love herself a slogan.

And so to the dance off where neither of them gives a bad performance, but I do think Tilly had the stronger routine. Sara’s Argentine Tango is a good production number for television broadcast, I’ll stand by that, but watching it again, she spends A LOT of time with her back to the judges and a significant portion of her time at the beginning just… standing there and walking a few steps like an NPC in Runescape waiting to toss a rose at a poor audience member while Aljaz does his little steppy steps

“steppy steps” being the technical term.
And so I don’t think Sara stood a chance against anyone with this routine, not even AJ’s avant garde paso because I think that still would have been able to connect better with the judges in terms of character and mood.
And it is very much a clean sweep of saves for Tilly and Nikita and Sara just misses out on Musicals Week

but hey, at least she got to do that 9 to 5 routine last week?
I’m glad Sara got to go out on a good routine, I was worried that she would go out on a dud of a salsa knowing she was capable of so much more.

And so, 7 couples advance to Musicals Week

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