*Record scratch* *Freeze frame* “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation…”

It’s called fashion, sweaty. Look it up.

With the pro dance featurette on It Takes Two having sold this as a “fashion week inspired routine” I was very excited because we’re long overdue a sequel to the masterpiece that was THIS routine

that isn’t what we got at all though, as I sat down naively on Sunday night expecting to see Nadiya shedding chicken feathers down a red carpet in the name of Victoria’s Secret on a Strictly budget and instead found myself coming face to face with Nancy in a void of vaginal threat

which isn’t not fashion, I’ve seen an Iris van Herpen show before but they very quickly dropped the pretence that this was in anyway Fashion Week and we had all accidentally come throw the wrong door and entered Nancy’s, what someone in a fit of outraged sexual arousal showed up in my mentions on Twitter calling, “Masonic Sex Cult #DefundTheBBC”

the only remaining vestiges of this ever being a fashion-based routine being the fact Nancy’s Apostles of Kink were wearing red full-length latex gloves for… reasons

as this was clearly filmed in May when the biggest Met Gala meme was Kodi Smit-McPhee showing up looking like he’d had to kill his entire family at 7 but serve drinks in an old timey saloon bar at 8

but we move at a lightning pace on the Internet and we’ve been through about 47 meme cycles since then, if you want to keep up you’ve gotta move faster than Paris Hilton walking the Versace runway like a novelty sipping birdy toy with a grudge and a husband to kill

the biggest disappointment was the fact the fashion wasn’t good, particularly Nadiya, Lauren and Katya being dressed up as Moulin Rouge humbugs with truly criminal wigs like this was a routine they’d had to plan in about 2 hours

we did at least get Karen with a cane and a welcome assist from Gorka, again both with red gloves if that’s what you’re into

and the only real moment of ~FASHION~ was when Johannes showed up looking like King Charles The Third had decided to modernise by calling himself King Chucky and giving the King’s Guard a makeover in the hopes of appealing to the younger, more guillotine-hungry members of the public

I do really want to hear the version of this routine without the music in which the only things you can hear are everyone’s latex gloves and leather trousers squeaking away like a murine choir in the walls of Victorian London’s most notorious bordello.

From one disappointing fashion parade to another, Tess and Claudia weirdly didn’t make a big entrance and instead just popping up on the balcony with Claudia looking like she was half-heartedly dressed up as a black cat for Halloween and Tess was going up against PETA for wearing the skin of those shiny lizard toys you can only buy in zoo gift shops

the judges don’t even get a walk on! Potentially because we’ve only got 45 minutes and they’re all dressed like they’re going to a school formal anyway

I guess the theme was “respectfully sombre” in which case, great job everyone, you nailed the “attending the funeral of a distant relative I don’t really know” vibe.

And we’re straight into the results and the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery, which for the uninitiated was a long time tradition in Monkseal’s Strictly recaps, which he sadly stopped writing after 2019 and if it weren’t for them I would never have started this blog, so now you know who to blame, but I’ll always be very grateful and I wanted to keep this tradition going, so on to The Faces!

and the first couple to be bathed in red are Hell’s organ grinders themselves, Kaye and Kai

and while they go and get some advice from the judges, Will has to go and throw up in someone’s handbag because he spent the entire time between now and his salsa anxiously downing Red Bulls

as for Craig’s advice, it’s mostly alluding to the fact Kaye has to dance like nobody’s watching, so while Kai tries and fails to convince the audience to wear blindfolds like they’re practicing for a Bird Box routine in Movies Week, we join Claudia in a now joyously full Clauditorium

where we get more talk of Tyler’s torch collection which we have surprisingly not had any footage of, although Dianne looks like she has seen far too much of these torches over the last two weeks

I assume they’re saving that for his inevitable couple’s choice routine that will involve a portion of blacked out torchography to Radioactive by Imagine Dragons which the show will describe as being ~edgy~ despite it very much looking like a commercial for an Audi.
Ellie Simmonds apparently sleeps in her sparkly frocks and very politely doesn’t complain about how the whole two Ellies thing is working out during the Red Light Announcements because she nearly had a heart attack when they said “Ellie and Johannes”

One of you is going to have to revert back to Eleanor, or we could make like America’s Next Top Model when they made the models pick a ~cool nickname~ for themselves and we ended up with a girl called Dionne being called Wholahay Brown for an entire episode.
Kym is on Charleston duty and very excited about it because she gets to show off her acting skills BECAUSE SHE’S AN ACTOR STARRING IN WATERLOO ROAD AND IT’S TAKING UP A LOT OF HER TIME!
But eclipsing ALL of that is Hamza telling us that he’ll be doing a rumba to the theme tune from Jurassic Park – a film he has not seen because he got a bit scared, and Jowita’s face during this suggests she knows that they’re going to have to sit down and watch it for their VT

it could be worse babe, Amy’s going to have to sit and have Guardians of the Galaxy explained to her before what is almost certainly another Death By Disney Sci-fi Property

Luba honey, I am so sorry that you had to watch the director’s commentary for The Last Jedi for that routine.
Lastly Richie tells us that Zoe Ball gives him daily affirmations because she’s like a second mother to him and a mother will always tell you your work is brilliant, thus sending the fear of God into Kym as she worries she wasn’t positive enough about her grandson’s piece of macaroni art before she made Graziano eat it for dinner

and while that thought eats her alive, it’s time for Robbie Williams to do what Robbie Williams does best, serve some slightly watered down Gary Barlow

Meow! It was nice to see Lauren out on the floor though but the whole thing was a bit of a dirge so we shall move SWIFTLY on and OH NO! We’re stuck in an advert for the Strictly social channels, although I’m not entirely sure 5 whole seconds of Karen shrieking like an off-key dolphin was a great advert

however Kai is still insisting that he can do an impression of Shirley which still sounds absolutely nothing like Shirley and Matt Goss can say one line in a New York Italian accent

cast him in The Godfather Part IV: Marinara Mayhem!

And now for more Safety Sex Faces

and so joining Kaye and Kai in the bottom two are none other than the terrors of Studio 54 themselves

Motsi’s advice is for him to actually listen to the music and do his best to ignore the wildly out of time clapping from the audience, as well as to remain present and not get too distracted by his own limbs again.

Up with Claudia and it’s a bit of a flying visit, imaginably because they needed to get Will to the nearest catholic priest for an exorcism because he’d been possessed by the ghost of Shergar

Jayde is doing Flashdance so we’ll see if Karen has built up enough clout within the Strictly hierarchy to be able to demand a bucket of actual water be dumped on her at the end of the routine or if she’ll have to settle to being tarred and feathered with body glitter and confetti instead. James is blithely unaware of the Chris Pratt flavoured death trap he’s walking into, Amy knows all too well and can already feel the green body paint seeping into her skin

she thought she’d done her time with Halloween Week last year but little did she know it was only the beginning of her journey as The New Dianne.
The only other routine reveal comes from Tony and Katya who are doing The Full Monty which means the horrendously muscular bodysuit is almost certainly coming out ~for the LOLs~

they paid £2500 for that bad boy, they have to use it eventually and if comedically buff Tony Adams doing a striptease is what it takes for it to be a tax write off, so be it.

As for the dance off… Well, it certainly wasn’t a vintage one with Matt Goss’s Disco Samba being as generally confusing and heinous as it was before except I feel like the trousers had somehow gotten even smaller

he sat in those all night! He’s probably still in them right now because I’m pretty sure they probably had to surgically staple him into them! But while Matt Goss’s disaster of a samba has the general fascinating draw of a 15 car pile up, Kaye’s dance off version of the Charleston just felt like I was reliving the moment in PE in which I had to do a teddy bear roll and my pants ripped

which is a moment I definitely don’t think about every night before I go to sleep or anything… And Kai pretty much had to shout himself hoarse through this whole routine because he was having to shout VERY loudly as Kaye was in a whole different timezone

I hope she’s having a great time in Madagascar.

As I said, this was not a good dance off for either couple and it could have gone either way with Shirley working out if she could potentially press both trapdoor buttons at the same time

it might have made things a little easier in the Widdringotn-Bychkova household that’s for sure. But Shirley didn’t get to cast her deciding vote because Matt Goss was scheduled to dance to the lead single of the highest grossing film of the year and Kaye was set to do Bridget Jones, so before Vicky Girl could so much as put one sequin on a pair of Big Pants, Kaye was eliminated by Craig, Motsi and Anton and raptured never to be seen again

but Shirley would have wanted to save her as the thought of Matt Goss doing Tom Cruise cosplay is a little unsettling and does just feel like cult recruitment propaganda.

And so, we’re down to 14 couples…

And if you’ve enjoyed this recap of Strictly Come Dancing’s second week results show and would like to support the blog, you can leave a small donation via my Ko-fi HERE.