This episode is sponsored by Johannes’s Face Acting.

All’s fair in love and tea.

With enough time having passed since they completely obliterated the Taj Mahal in their last attempt at a Bollywood routine

set a little predictably to Jai Ho – IT WAS SEVEN YEAR AGO, IT WAS A DIFFERENT TIME! – Strictly was having another go at the genre, a more culturally sensitive take – inviting in Bollywood costume designers, makeup artists and of course getting the dancers and choreographers back in – a fact they were very proud of and made sure to emphasise on It Takes Two which I was excited for! Then the music struck up and like the slow horror of realising last year’s nod to Irish Dancing was going to be a tavern brawl to a vaguely Celtic cover version of Safety Dance – The Celebration of Bollywood routine was going to be danced to a megamix of Dua Lipa’s Levitating and Justin Bieber’s Sorry with a Bhangra drum playing somewhere in the next room, with a late addition of Kelly Rowland’s Work but that’s more forgivable because it’s basically the Rosetta Stone of music and somehow spans each and every culture in some form of remix.
It just would have been nice to have it done to some proper Hindi music, just you know to make it look slightly less like you were reducing a culture to aesthetics alone… ON THIS SHOW!? And I think my favourite part of the whole routine was the little interlude from these two

complete scene stealers.

Nonetheless, our Bollywood Short begins with our two main characters

starring in their feature debut, Will You Marry Me? *wink*

and a colourful supporting cast of Michelle’s Backing Dancers

and Ramzan’s Backing dancers

with guest star spots from Cameron the tuktuk driver who is here to spread the word of Christ

and Johannes as, The Fashionable Gay Friend

a trope that spans the cinematic divide apparently, but this was a progressive take and not mere tokenisation because apparently Michelle was his and Kai’s adopted daughter

we’re back in the timeline where Kai and Johannes are married, good to know.

With Michelle taking the lead, she was of course going to make absolutely sure you still know that she has upper thighs

God, I just know she’s got the power to completely resurrect the art of Filthy Latin from The Mausoleum of Brendan Cole – give her whichever Olympic heartthrob retires next, the people demand it! I’m people.

With their wedding plans underway, problems arose, and by problems I mean Nadiya who spilled tea from the creatively named Tea Stall on Ramzan and then patted him down and like this was a romcom from 2002 relationship hijinks ensued! (I guess we should be happy they realised the optics of Ramzan patting Nadiya’s chest down would look much worse)

this apparently being enough to make Michelle want to tear the man to ribbons like a lioness that hasn’t eaten for 2 weeks and just spotted an injured antelope on the horizon

unsurprisingly Katya is incredibly good at looking like she’s about to scratch the eyes out of someone that crossed her best gal pal – she has completely scalped women for lesser crimes than *checks notes* spilling a drink on her friend’s fiancé so Nadiya is lucky she got to the end of this routine with her hair in tact – Luba was *this* close to becoming The Designated Blonde! Meanwhile Cameron was furious he missed the whole furore because he was too busy parking the tuktuk

YOU PARKED IN MY SPOT NEIL!

But Michelle and Ramzan weren’t the only ones that Nadiya was causing problems for, because the tea spilling hussy was starting her play for Kai in amidst the chaos of Michelle and Ramza arguing over how much having tea spilled over your counts as cheating

KAI HO! DOES JOHANNES MEAN NOTHING TO YOU, KAI? YOU BOUGHT HIM AN ASCOT!

YOU HAVE A DAUGHTER! You threatened her fiance that if he ever has tea spilled on him again he’d only ever be able to drink out of a straw, YOU HYPOCRITE!

romance is dead.
I think I lost the thread of this recap somewhere around the part where Strictly had to find a family-friendly relationship conflict and settled quite literally on spilled milk and now Michelle and Ramzan live in blissful, dairy-free wedlock

maybe romance isn’t completely dead.

The first round of The Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery yielded some truly phenomenal results as for maximum chaos, Ellie and Johannes were called safe first and I’ll grant them this one (1) out of sync effort because Johannes squashing his face purely out of relief that he and Ellie could go bury the rumba in the car park was sublime

Hamza remains to pure for the artform known as Sex Facing

and we all got a look at Tony Adams’s throbbing veins

but then it did begin to slowly sink in that the bottom 2 couples had just been called safe, which usually means disaster is about to strike and BAM! Red light for Ellie and Nikita as the Charleston Curse continues

there’s not a great deal of advice Shirley can give her either given that they got a reasonably high score, it was essentially go backstage and just hope that Tyler has to sweat his way through the most miserable Viennese Waltz again.

Up with Claudia and we find out next week is Tony’s turn to curb stomp a jive into remission because if there’s one thing Katya is not going to let Tony be, it’s the handbag that she dances around, and if there’s one thing Tony isn’t going to be, it’s probably a good jiver – couldn’t have just lobbed him a waltz after the salsa, guys? The jiva has been Katya’s last dance for the last 2 series, can she make it a third?
Hamza is getting to do Couple’s Choice and if you’ve wondered why they’ve been a little conservative on the use of CGI animals in his routines, it’s because they were too busy downloading the Zoo Tycoon: Africa Expansion Pack for his Afrobeat Couple’s Choice – get ready for weirdly smoothe lions, slightly levitating hippos and leopards that move like they’re made out jelly and chicken wire.
Ellie and Johannes have to vigorously thank their fans at home, while Fleur and Vito have to thank Vito’s mafia money family for the phone votes they definitely didn’t buy

Donatella and Lorenzo Coppola will do anything for their baby boy, including burning down a tiny prop shoe warehouse. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED BALLAS.

And now for a performance from Luke Evans of Constantly Being Touted As The Next Bond Fame

it was a big weekend for rollneck sweaters apparently.
His performance of the dirge that is Bridge Over Troubled Waters (a truly bizarre choice of song for the occasion) being accompanied by a a dance from Kai and The Tea Spilling Harlot of Mumbai

bridge over troubled waters indeed.

In the Judges Debrief, Craig gets the opportunity to defend not giving Hamza a 10 and while he flounders and gabbles about inward facing feet with zero footage to back him up, everyone else looks on, clearly not believing a word he’s saying

someone’s about to get voted off the island.

And now to find out who joins Ellie and Nikita in the Dance Off:

and I’m not going say it was painfully obvious that Molly was going to be in the dance off by this point, but there was absolutely no way that Kym and Graziano’s sexy murder tango was going to be in the bottom, we know how the voting public works and so the ambiguously romantic Foxtrot bottoms out

When she needed the HRVY Army most, they vanished.
Craig had some helpful advice for Molly, I assume, I was a little bit distracted by The Woman Behind Craig adding to her Eastenders reaction face showreel

James Bye could NEVER.

While the graphics team reboots the whale’s ribcage of floral arches for Molly’s foxtrot, Claudia informs us that Helen and Gorka are doing a salsa to Despacito and Gorka would like all of us to prepare for it

and the reason he’s having to canvASS for votes so hard is because he’s lost the support of his three year old daughter who has mutinied and joined Team Will Mellor, such was the power of Will’s Dirty Dancing American Smooth That Fu[NOT IN FRONT OF THE CHILD]. And that’s it really, Kym is happy to be safe and Tyler announces he loves food. So that’s three things we know about Tyler: He likes torches and food and doesn’t know how long a marathon is – I feel a little bit like this series has fallen a bit short in terms of allowing us to get to know the contestants.

The Dance Off went as smooth as their first runs for both of the couples so with Molly being the more polished of the two, it was sadly Ellie and Nikita who were sent home and she got a really lovely send off from both Nikita and all the other dancers

I really thought she’d have made to at least the quarterfinals so I’m really sad to see her go. I will be interested to see how this impacts the general perception of Tony given that it was at about this point last year that we lost fan fav Sara Davies which is when people began to get a little annoyed with Dan Walker, the endearing duffer of 2021.

And so, we’re down to single figures with only 9 couples remaining

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