It was Professor Plum in the Ballroom with Dave Arch’s baton!
Harold, they’re lesbians.
Apparently Strictly is well and truly into its Big Gay Dance Era, it’s the least they could do for us after almost two decades of insistent heterosexuality – with this year’s edition being Lesbian angst the likes of which I haven’t seen since Suranne Jones made it her bread and butter
there wasn’t a Bath of Lesbian Sorrow on that dancefloor but it FELT like there was a Bath of lesbian sorror on that dancefloor
the dance obviously being about the tumultuous relationship between Luba and Karen after Luba spent the entirety of last series basically screaming “GIVE ME A LADY PARTNER!” down the barrel of the camera at any chance she got
and then lo and behold, another year on the bench while she has to watch all of Karen’s dreams come true
🎵 I’m in the corner, watching you kiss her 🎵
🎵 I’m right over here, why can’t you see me 🎵
It’s the haircut Luba, I’m sure you’ve got the bone structure to pull off The Kristen Stewart or at the very least The Sarah Paulson – you can’t just paint yourself green twice and expect to get your own way, as an unjust as it seems
although I’m sure Amy would have really appreciated it if you had taken the bullet for Movie Week, she’s still trying to scrub the Celtic Moor 1 grease paint out of her ears.
With all her hard work squandered and not coming to sapphic fruition, she was going to be damned if she was going to perform this routine in the suits from the Wicked routine
and so she cut off the sleeves like a child cutting off the toes of their stuffed animal because their mother wouldn’t let them go out for the weekend (don’t ask, it was a complicated childhood)
as for what Johannes’s excuse was – he’ll be damned if Luba’s the only one getting a cool customised suit
somewhere there are two pairs of green sleeves waiting to be turned into an elf costume for the Strictly Christmas Special, you have two months to brace yourselves for that particular samba.
But perhaps the ultimate betrayal of all was the fact that there was a third player in this tumultuous relationship, and despite Jayde Adams’s PR Department sending Jason Gilkison 4 labrador puppies and a £20 Hotel Chocolat giftcard, it was not Jayde making a dramatic barefooted appearance halfway through this routine. It was a bigger betrayal – it is a well known fact that you can only have 1 blonde female professional dancer on the main cast at any one time – they tried to have both Nadiya and Luba on the cast in 2019 and BOOM! Both in the dance off in the first week because of the conflicting flaxen energy and definitely not because they were partnered with two of the most awkward men on the planet
and as it turns out, Karen has a bad case of Xanthagnosia, or Blonde Blindness to give it its common name which I could have used but I spent far too much time etymologically engineering “Xanthagnosia” to not use it, so it was salt in the Interchangeable Blondeâ„¢ wound as it was revealed the other woman was Nadiya Bychkova!
somewhere Dan Walker is clutching a rosary – both because he’s aghast but also because this was not a good enough excuse to have bare feet on television. Kai? Oh, he’s into it.
But it turns out that Nadiya wasn’t best pleased with Karen’s shenanigans either, she’s grafted hard for her position on the main Pro Roster and was going to be damned if she was treated as a second fiddle to Luba “Greenface” Mushtuk – she launched David James through the air dressed as Batman
she launched Lee Ryan through the hair on a hoverboard dressed as Marty McFly (who the band McFly is named after)
WHILE DRESSED AS SEXY DOC BROWN
she shockingly didn’t launch Dan Walker through the air but she did dress up as a lobster for religious reasons AND IT WASN’T EVEN A SEXY LOBSTER
and well, we saw what she did with Matt Goss so Karen needed to make a choice – one blonde or no blonde! But with Karen being barely able to tell the two of them apart (she thought Luba was Tess Daly for two whole years), Nadiya had no choice but to tell her to take her Mac Cosmetics sponsorship and leave
Luba didn’t quite have the same level of self-worth and was willing to try and make things work as long as Karen told her what setting to put the clippers onto
Futch Luba Mushtuk 2023 HERE WE COME!
Up on the Results Show Balcony, Luba and Claudia were not bothering with the usual respectful dark tones that the results show called for and Claudia had instead opted for a white suit because it’s what Matt Goss would have wanted
I can’t quite get over the fact Nadiya’s blouse has the same texture as the underbelly of a salmon though and it’s making me a little queasy.
There’s nothing overwhelming foreshadowing in the look behind the scenes but we do get the triumphant, bellowing return of Floor Manager Greg
and we find out who was responsible for leaving Will Mellor and his ever decreasing ability to stand up last to be announced as safe for the evening
And then I’m also at least 70% sure that Will Mellor’s behind the scenes bit was filmed in A&E
Nancy didn’t even drive him there, she just made him walk.
And with with that it’s onto the first Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery, with Fleur getting a bottom 2 bounce and delivering at a level that everyone else should be aspiring to
Hamza is too pure for the Safety Sex Face
and then finding themselves grounded by Clifford The Big Red Spotlight were Little Miss Busy and Graziano
I for one am shocked that this didn’t resonate with the voting public
Craig’s advice wasn’t to use the next 20 minutes to break into the production gallery and destroy the graphic assets but instead just go out there and relax because it’s pretty obvious that Matt Goss is going to doing The Jive 2: Womble-footed Boogaloo, so go and have another 6 martinis if it makes you feel better
While Graziano nips backstage to get the disappointing airline lasagne ready (SHOE’S ON THE OTHER FOOT NOW KYM) the safe couples get ready from some 100 Years of the BBC Week reveals in which Molly coyly tells us she wants her Couple’s Choice routine to show that she and Carlos are like a bunch of cheeky school kids – completely burying the lede that she’s dancing to the Grange Hill theme tune, so we’re in for another George at ASDA nightmare
Carlos meanwhile has absolutely no idea what Grange Hill is or how you’re going to choreograph anything to a piece of music that sounds like you put a duck in a tube and rolled it down a hill, but I had better get Carlos and Molly playing dress up on the set of Nova Jones out of this
PUT ON THE GIANT NOSE AND DANCE FOR ME CARLOS, DANCE THE DANCE OF LOVE!
While Carlos frantically watches a couple of 240p episodes of Grange Hill on Youtube, Johannes is going to have to try and choreograph a tango to the Casualty theme tune – I’m just worried quite how themed they go – we’ve seen a football kit turned tango dress already, dare they go paramedic jumpsuit turned tango dress? Tear away scrubs? Will one of them be impaled by a scaffolding pole? WILL THERE BE A MEDIUM-SIZED AMBULANCE? Only time will tell.
Then in a move that was painfully obvious from the moment the theme was announced weeks ahead of the show, Tony Adams will be dancing to the Grandstand Theme Tune and Katya’s machiavellian cogs are already turning
glittery footballs? Shorter shorts? Did she jump the footballing shark too early with that Tango? How many goal celebrations can she shove into a 90 second Cha Cha Cha?
Before we get to the second half of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery, it’s the quarterly reminder of what George Ezra looks like
I guarantee I’ll forget in about 2 weeks time and I look forward to seeing him again as I find myself questioning why I’m inexplicably watching Jools Hollands’s Annual Hootenanny again.
He is accompanied by what seems like far too many guitars
as well as Kai and Michelle doing my favourite Special Guest Star Performance move in which the male pro just carries the female pro off the stage in a dramatic spin
it thrills me every time.
An in order to find out who’s giving us our next lot of cursed song and dance reveals, Tess has the candidates
with Kym and Graziano’s opponents being whittled down to either the man running a 40 degree temperature or the man with the icy touch of a gecko – you can decided who’s who, with Matt Goss and Natalie Lowe ultimately finding themselves in the dance off
so while Blonde (2022, A. Dominik) goes backstage to give Matt Goss a last ditch lesson in how knee joints work, Claudia is hosting the Roast of Dianne Buswell by gleefully pointing out that this is only the second time she has ever ventured beyond the limits of Week 4 which wasn’t a surprise with Richard Coles performing a Paso Doble dressed as Boris Johnson’s ideal self in week 3
but she is the Queen of Shock Boots with Dev Griffin being eliminated in week 4, which I very much blame on the lingering trauma of Dev sweating off blue body paint and Dianne looking like she’s been doing terrible things with a smurf the week prior
of course she should have been able to drag Max George to at least Week 6 but Bottom 2 Goddess Maisie Smith was a voracious combatant, and then last year was simply divine intervention
and we thank her for it.
With the Roast of Dianne over with, James tells us all about his Foxtrot to the Eastenders theme tune thus revealing his only purpose on the show and he’s very much getting Ol’ Yeller’d the week after with a Halloween Salsa.
We’re getting a pair of Charlestons from Helen and Gorka doing theirs to the Blue Peter theme tune and imaginably making their own model of Tracy Island during the whole thing – but remember kids, don’t groove walk with scissors. For their own Charleston, Jayde and Karen will be playing the roles of Barry and Freda from Victoria Wood’s The Ballad of Barry and Freda and if I don’t see someone being bent over backwards on a hostess trolley, wearing nothing but stilettos and an oven glove or being beaten on the bottom with a Women’s Weekly then this routine was for NOTHING.
And to celebrate the upcoming BBC Centenary Week, the celebs all had to do a promotional bit as newsreaders through the years in which Ellie Simmonds did the most preposterous old timey radio voice you’ve ever heard, Ellie Taylor manages to pull off the whole look surprisingly well so they’re penning that theme in for one of her dances
for some reason Fleur was dressed like the star of a coming of age film where an unfocused schoolboy that gets in trouble at school learns that all he needs is an artistic hobby to focus on
Tyler and Matt looked like they host a middlingly successful football podcast to together that they never edit the drinking noises out of
Helen and Jayde look like two sides of the same pensioner
and then James and Kym had to do their bits over zoom because they are just so busy with their very serious acting jobs
if you need me, I’m trying to convince the Daily Express that they have a deep feud between one another going on, all it took was Giovanni and Richie sitting 10 centimetres apart, these two won’t even be in the same room as one another!
The dance off went very much as expected, try as she might to distract Anton from watching Matt’s wildly flailing jive
sadly she just doesn’t have the hypnotic draw of a warthog’s derriere, the heart simply wants what the heart wants
and so Anton saw the whole thing unfold before his very eyes and even Shirley would have felt hard pressed to find a reason to save Matt over Kym save for the potential angle of wanting to put Kym out of her misery as she seems to become increasingly disillusioned with the process, and so it was farewell to Matt and Nadiya
we’ll never know what he would have done for 100 Years of the BBC Week but I like to think it would have been a Foxtrot to the theme tune for The Clangers.
And so, we’re down to 12 couples
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