She may have become too powerful.

This Barbie is a Recap.

Unsurprisingly the big ensemble cast group number for this year’s Movie Week was in honour of the Barbie Movie. Sadly there was no nod to Oppenheimer, unless you count the nuclear explosion happening in the synapses of the girls behind Carlos as they saw Nikita mounting the tables

Ever since the Strictly hype started ramping up this year I have been making jokes and taking bets as to which of the revolving blonde dyad would get to be Barbie and the routine immediately opens on Nadiya dressed Barbara Millicent Roberts (Original 1959 Flavour)

which does feel like Nadiya has reached her final form and can now ascend to Strictly Godhood and watch over every future professional dancer forced to guide the most awkward bird-legged men through a salsa. HOWEVER, Original Barbie isn’t the lead in this number, this is the Dreamhouse sequence – the lead is, rather appropriately, the 1965 Dancing Doll Barbie and Luba is just I Broke Up With My Boyfriend And Went On The Holiday Anyway Barbie

so who THE HELL is Malibu Dreamhouse Dancing Doll Barbie!? It’s not Nancy, evidently she’s just President Doing A Photo Op With The Unfortunates Barbie

it wasn’t Jowita either because she was Trapped In The Mirror World OH GOD PLEASE HELP ME! Barbie

and it was never going to be Karen because she could only ever be Eoghan Quigg Barbie

Katya was likewise never going to get the Barbie crown as she was once again drawn to cheap spandex like a moth to a flame (shout out to the absolutely WILD dental floss cut of Katya’s tie-dye singlet)

and Lauren was once again having her head eaten by a wig as Rodeo Wonder Barbie with Michelle playing Very Serious Journalist Barbie reporting live from the Horse Girl Dream Ranch Playset

leaving none other than Dianne Buswell sitting atop her ivory blonde tower

and yes, to the Morgan McMichaelases in the audience, she did indeed jump from there

and of course there had to be Kens and the lead could only ever be one person because who else’s contract comes with a mandated pecs’n’abs claus?

which is probably also why Nadiya could never be Lead Barbie considering she, due to her height, typically only gets partnered by either Johannes or Kai and the former was Gay Best Friend Ken

and Kai was Midlife Crisis Ken and for some reason was no longer wearing the scalp of a 5 year Austrian boy despite it being thematically appropriate

speaking of thematically appropriate, Neil got to be Allan and you really do wonder if he lies awake at night pondering why he’s always the punchline in a group routine, like babe… are you genuinely ok with it?

naturally Vito is Doing The Lord’s Work Ken. Then there was Nikita as Rival Ken because according to someone from the recording, they had to film his table top pelvic workout several times because he kept pulling too much of a sex face

and thus I am currently putting together a task force to infiltrate the BBC and steal the harddrive that that footage exists on for entirely scientific reasons

Fleur’s Weekly Rap-up Update: already dead, it did not last two weeks.

The hosts and judges continue to be treated with absolutely no fanfare on the results show so it’s celebratory work luncheon at the golf club outfits all round

and while the two of them decided between the Soup of the Day or the Prawn Cocktail, backstage Karen had still not recovered from the sheer “WHY?” of their 10 and had to be moved around like a medium-sized prop

and Nigel had returned from his meditation and was ready to take back his role of Katya’s Whipped Partner from Keith From The Cereal Aisle

and the BBC continues to have the contestants say things like this directly to camera with no sense of irony as the BBC bosses fume about the ease of obtaining spoilers before the results show airs a full 24 hours after it’s recorded with a studio audience

I would love for them to go back to a live results show but, being very familiar with television production, I know it’s significantly more convenient and economically viable to pre-record on the same night and air it at a more audience-friendly time. Not that you really needed a spoiler to know how this week would pan out but shout out to the BatNigel fans who were really worried for some reason.

And now for the first installation of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery in which some people are not reacting nearly hard enough, I hope things improve as the eliminations get a little less obvious

and the first couple in the bottom 2 are Zara and Graziano

who Anton gives some truly terrible advice to someone who has just found themselves in the bottom 2 after scoring a Movie Week inflated 25

so while those two went to scream their feelings into a bowl of warm milk

the safe couple’s got to discuss how a case of The Nigel Harmans is currently doing the rounds, symptoms of which include a violent and unquenchable desire to meditate at all times

the Les Dennis Naptime Broom Cupboard has been barricaded as a precaution – they can’t keep abducting people from the local Tesco to fill places and perform truly horrific jives. Next week we’re thankfully back down to one Jive and oh what a This Won’t End Well For You, Babe Jive it is… But of the routines we learn about from this group Ellie’s getting the ponytail ready for a Copacabana Samba and after making Adam go Cha Cha > Rock Tango > Legs, Bums & Tums he gets the week off with the third waltz of the series to Curtis Stigers’s I Wonder Why – I truly can’t wait to see what Luba does with that saxophone solo and also to see why this is obviously a dance Adam requested

the song choice is dubious enough but please be an incredibly ill-advised “this dance is dedicated to my dance school owning wife who never taught me how to dance” waltz.

Meanwhile Eddie heartily praised the abilities of the costume department because he looked around, saw what everyone else was wearing and breathed a sigh of relief that he was in a plain black suit

and Bobby got to give a shout out to his God-daughter who apparently did a show and tell presentation about him, but sadly he couldn’t go in person so she had to settle for the next best thing – a copy of Grazia

shout out to the teacher who had to vet the magazine and just check she could trust a 10 year old with page 13’s Chart of Lust

Bobby may have got to do a glossy magazine photoshoot, but Ellie got to be mentioned in her old primary school’s newsletter

there were no pictures or colour printing.

You know how 3 minutes ago I said that Nadiya usually gets partnered with Johannes and Kai? Well obviously there are exceptions that prove the rule and one of those exceptions is sometimes you’ve gotta let the two hot blondes have a Sexy Hair Flipping Battle Royale and because Luba was currently dressed as Men.Com Luigi, Nadiya’s sparring partner for the evening had to be THAT ROLE STEALING BITCH DIANNE BUSWELL Nikita

and I think we might have to chalk this one up to a double defeat – it was all going so well for Nadiya and then she got devoured by her own platinum blonde hubris

and Nikita’s was just to sweaty after having to spend 20 minutes doing 18 takes of overly libidosome pelvic thrusts
And Madison Beer did great at sitting there hoping nobody would notice the ladder in her tights

you’ve got to watch out for those cat claws, they’ll rip everything to shreds if you don’t regularly clip them

Kitty Not-so-Softpaws.

Over in the second wing of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery…

the bottom 2 came down to Nigel being let down by Cereal Aisle Keith and Nikita’s Lost Faith In Humanity – see if you can guess who had mentality checked out before they could even turn on the red light

he came, he kenned, he collected a paycheck.

Truly no interesting information came from this lot except for the fact Krishnan now has to fend of offers to dance from cabinet ministers looking to launder their images without having to go The Full Widdecombe

and Angela Rippon may have reached stratospheric heights of unrelatability as she had to describe tracksuits to people because she doesn’t know the word tracksuit

it is unspecified as to whether or not they had “JUICY” written on the bum but we can all believe.

Dance Off time and really both of these performances suffer from the same problems – not a single movement is big or strong enough and there’s a dearth of charisma in the characterisation which only becomes more pronounced in Movies Week when you’re performing for the second time at 10pm. I was a little surprised that they had bothered to re-setup the staging for Zara’s paso given that the extremely not medium-sized background chair didn’t actually need to be there except to create some very confusing CATS (2019) scale dynamics

but Zara’s routine, although about half the speed it ought to have been, did at least feel like she did all the steps, Nikita’s jive on the other hand felt like it got even more garbled and every kick sequence felt like an eternity and because her feet can’t be trusted, Gorka just spun her around for just about the entirety of their elimination Last Dance

be the crowd clearing device you were always meant to be.

And that’s it for Movies Week!

And if you’ve enjoyed this recap and would like to support the blog, you can leave a small donation via my Ko-fi HERE.