If you follow the teachings of Gossism for Four Weeks, you too can ascend to the astral plane!

All the glitter is biodegradable. We assume.

This week, instead of going straight from the opening credits and into the pro dance, we open with Tess and Claudia introducing the number and stressing the fact it’s about the BBC’s natural history unit which probably would have been pretty easy to gather from the montage of beautiful footage from their nature documentaries

and then it became abundantly clear why they’d had to introduce it and explain exactly what was happening because we were dropped face first into some very gussety grass skirt wearing problemania

GILKISON WHY? I mean don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the excessive shirtlessness and sexy confetti dribble as much as the next person

and I’m thrilled that Cameron at least got to forward roll again because the little doofus deserved something nice to come of this

TWICE

They’re doing this specifically for me at this point, right?
But I shall not be bribed with Baby’s First Acrobatics Class because you know… there’s A LOT of coding going on here and I’m not sure it’s giving me “the element of Earth” as you promised so much as it is a moodboard with “tribal” written on it that should be burnt before I use it for evidence in The Hague in my own going court case accusing Jason Gilkison of dance-based war crimes.
And burn it he did as the Fire Nation Attacked and the ballroom was consumed by a blaze of combative Kate Bushes

and honestly nothing made me laugh harder this weekend than watching Katya (I think) book it out onto the dancefloor from the darkness of the wings like she’d forgotten the dance was starting and was in the middle of a cigarette break

and here to rescue us from Dianne’s arson attack is our Lord and Saviour, Nadiya Bychkova, descending from the heavens and recreating life anew

and on the sixth day She created man and decked him out in some sweet luxury John Lewis sleepwear made from 100% organic silk

and because Kai gets easily bored and Nadiya wont invent a deck of cards because that would be a misuse of her Godly powers, she instead created him some more friends in her image, teeny tiny little arm hankies and all

and within three days the lot of them had apparently started a cult, it’s the natural progression of things

it was a very worthy routine but I was disappointed that they just recycled Nadiya’s air costume for the water sequence which amounted mostly to playing a vintage screensaver on the screens

although I did appreciate Dianne wafting around like one of those Spanish Dancers (which is the actual name of a species of sea slug and I’m not just being very flippant about flamenco dancers)

but come on, you could have painted Luba blue and had her wiggle around on the floor like a Marine Iguana

she went and learned how to do synchronised swimming and everything

the least you could have done was replay this footage of Adam Peaty for us

it’s what David Attenborough would have wanted.

So with the planet saved from Jason Gilkison by the spiritual ascension of Nadiya, it’s onto the first round of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery and clearly A LOT of couples were bricking it this week because everyone delivered some stellar efforts

and finding themselves in an after school detention for wasting perfectly good mashed potato IN THIS ECONOMY were Molly and Carlos

which shocked and confounded Tyler

so while he goes and points his torch at every computer in the production gallery while making little buzzing noises to see how this could possibly have happened, Motsi tells Molly to commit arson

Oh great, now we’ve got to put Nadiya back in the harness to put out Molly’s ballroom fire!

Up with Claudia we find out absolutely NOTHING about Halloween Week but we do find out that Katya feeds Tony carrots like a horse

hold your palm flat and don’t make any sudden movements or you’ll spook him.
Meanwhile Helen has trained Gorka to bring her breakfast and I’m almost entirely certain it’s not as easy as a bacon butty from some greasy spoon cafe and involves preparing a bowl of overnight oats and hand squeezing orange juice – and you better believe she’ll taste if it’s not organic.
Kym gets gets a very cute video of her grandchildren dancing, James has to thank the entirety of the Eastenders cast for posting his voting number all over Twitter and Will gets to thank his legion of new fans now that he’s doing Safe For Work content

is he though?

This week’s musical guest was Becky Hill, who I mostly remember as BECKY SMASH! from The Voice where she performed every song like she was about to suplex one of the backing singers into submission and most notably loudly swore in the middle of one of her performances and spent another running around the studio in close combat with a microphone cord

but things have changed, this is a new Becky, a softer Becky who sings pop-y dance tracks so Luba and Giovanni were safe to dance around her without fearing for their lives

the song didn’t fair quite so well – I think Becky is a much better studio singer – she’s got a very easy to produce voice and I’m not sure a lot of her music quite translates to live singing, but I did enjoy her hamming it up in the close shots because there was a whole Shakespearean monologue going on in her head for a song whose lyrics are mostly “La da di da da da da”

and she looked great in her nan’s bedspread

but truly the highlight of the whole thing was Luba spinning up a storm

GIVE. HER. A. PARTNER. I’m ready for the Lubaissance to begin, Karen’s most likely doing a runner after this series so there’s room.

Between this and the next round of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery there is The Judges’ Debrief which I usually exclude because it’s not very useful but is worth mentioning this week only because of this screenshot

I shall be using it often.

Onwards to the Sex Faces and again, everyone is delivering at maximum intensity, Hamza still abstaining and merely entering a meditative safe space like a hibernating hedgehog

I’m willing to forgive Ellie for not looking to camera just because Nikita looks like he’s having an oral prolapse.
But this does of course mean it’s quite the decider between Tyler & Dianne or Jayde & Karen, with our pair of Victorias finding themselves bathed in red

got to be honest, I would have LIVED for the chaos of leaving this final announcement being between Molly and Tyler – lean into the chaos, clearly the voting public are!
Shirley’s advice is for Jayde to concentrate on the finishes in her routine all the while almost pointedly using the word “entertainer” and not “dancer” throughout. So while Jayde nips backstage to quote tweet and dunk on Twitter trolls with 20 followers, Ellie’s taking everyone’s coffee orders

apparently despite being a radio DJ for several years, Fleur has never drunk a coffee before but succumbed to the caffeinated siren as Vito spreads the Italian Agenda – so now we know why that Cha Cha Cha was so manic, she’d spent an entire week drinking espressos for the first time in her life, anybody would have gone a little bit loopy because of it.
Still no news on the closely guarded secrets of Halloween Week though but because this week was so ballroom heavy, I’m expecting a whole load of very glittery trapdoor Latin routines and someone’s going to be sent home looking like a couple on a Hawaiian honeymoon got caught up in a zombie apocalypse.

With that, it’s to the dancefloor for the Dance Off, the result of which I don’t think really surprised anyone, they weren’t going to jettison the CBBC Starlet who hasn’t scored below 30 in all 5 weeks – no, they’ll hold off until Musicals Week when they toss a coin to decide if it’s her or Tyler who gets the shocking late stage booting. But what I will say for Jayde is that I do think this was a better performance and she had applied as much of what the judges had asked for as she could – but Carlos took a second faceful of mashed potato and you can’t really overlook that

even if Shirley was looking mightily shifty in her seat

you can tell she’s itching to use deciding vote – she’s going to go utterly balmy if she doesn’t get to at least cause a little bit of Halloween chaos as a treat, but even she agreed to save Molly and thus Jayde and Karen were the 4th couple to leave

thus continuing the long running tradition of Karen getting eliminated in some wild outfits, including Sentient Pile of Tissues

Sad Barefooted Duchess of the Emotionally Draped Fabric Realm

Tim Burton’s Little Orphan Annie

Mark Wright’s Biggest Cheerleader

and The Scottish Seductress (I really like this one)

like I said, I get the feeling she’s departing the show and that’s why they gave her a partner that she could just do a load of fun, entertainment heavy routines with and I think that’s as good a send off from the show as you could hope for. But I’d be very pleased to be wrong because I do really like Karen as a presence on the show.

And so, we’re done to 11 as we enter Spoopy Week

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