Hold tight spidermonkey.

Missing: One 10 Paddle. Pale, medium build – last seen about a year ago.

Our Blackpool Week starts in the aftermath of a corporate dinner and charity fundraiser as the smokey jazz singer belts out the haunting lyrics of Somebody Else’s Guy

(everything reminds me of him…)

and the only soul left at the party cleaning up the half-eaten voulevants and room temperature prawn cocktails is Johannes

and because Johannes is apparently the Cinderella of the Strictly crew and is being forced to clean up everyone else’s mess, his Fairy Godmother appears to take pity on him

as per Luba’s own description of this plot “I find a very withdrawn and shy Johannes who hasn’t realised his full potential and take him on a magical journey!” because if there’s one thing we know about Johannes it’s that he’s very closeted and completely unaware of his own star power

and Luba’s solution to this situation is to get him absolutely blasted at the most illicit speakeasy in Blackpool where the strength of the local moonshine is as much a liability to your health as the fact Bobby is careening around that dancefloor with no idea what he’s meant to be doing at any one given moment – but he was potentially confused because the audience clapping at about 5 different tempos

Angela Rippon wasn’t doing a great deal better and was mostly being lead around the dancefloor as people dragged her out of the way of the oncoming Charlestoning stampede or clinging to various professional dancers

(very much the blind leading the blind there)

by the end of it Bobby just gets parked on a table at the back and told to gogo dance in the far distance as the rest of the celebs form a sort of sidelining chorus line

I do imagine the completely sleeveless and progressively more sheer dress shirts had to be kept under lock and key or they would never manage to get Vito into proper black tie ever again.

Then for the big finale and the grand transformation of Johannes, Luba performs a drag queen summoning 8-count which looks alarmingly like 90% of hers and Adam’s Couple’s Choice routine

and BAM! Johannes in drag is summoned and Luba gets fully Single White Female-d

so busy watching her back for the dagger in Nadiya’s hands she failed to see the piano wire in Johannes’s but if you’re going to go out, you might as well do it dressed as a disco Christmas tree. Perhaps Claudia in her glamorous surgical outfit can save her life

we can rebuild her, we have the technology.

Bobby Brazier & Dianne Buswell
Jive / Wake Me Up Before You Go-go – WHAM!

Bobby may have stomped with emotionless poise through Milan, Paris and Albert Square but he’s never been to the glittering lights of Blackpool and he was VERY excited about his long weekend at the seaside because Dianne had promised him he could have £20 of pocket money to use at the arcade

if he doesn’t say thank you she doesn’t cut the crusts off his bread for him.

The show had to do a lot of insisting that Bobby was very excited about being at Blackpool

because Bobby had had to learn both his jive and 20 seconds of extra choreography for the opening group number and was struggling more than Angela Rippon going in the second half of the performance order to stifle a yawn at every given moment

his fans are newly invigorated into dragging him to the final and I would like them to think long and hard about whether that’s a good idea because in a couple of weeks he is going to have to start learning 2 full dances a week and I truly think that might kill him. And if the choreography doesn’t, Dianne will – she’s already snapped his rock off

I fear this may be a precursor to dressing him up as Willy Wonka for Musicals Week in their best attempt to tie in with the (absolute lack of hype) for Wonka, the Timothee Chalamet disaster vehicle. Bobby’s visible boredom may have also been because he went to Blackpool and all he got was a tour of a rock making factory while Carlos got to ride a high speed medium-sized horse

so with Bobby experiencing a subpar candy induced sugar crash, it was time to Jive!

in any other given non-themed week of Strictly someone doing the Jive would have to perform it as though they’re doing a work experience placement – Authorised Jive Occupations include Chip Shop Owners, Vintage Record Store Pedant, 1950s Themed Bar Owner and Supermarket Stripper

and given all the things they could do with the space in Blackpool and the extra dancers I can’t quite believe that they decided to give Bobby and Dianne 5 pieces of MDF floating in the massive ballroom like a few one-person-sized doors in the Atlantic Ocean

this is just… nothing. Why are you trying to make the ballroom, FAMED FOR ITS SIZE AND OPULENCE, look smaller? It’s like we’re watching a dress rehearsal for a drama club’s production of Hairspray – that being said, I’m glad they finally got Bobby into some decent tailoring, they’ve owed us ever since the Viennese Thermals.

For the most part this wasn’t a bad jive and given Bobby is built like a locust

he coped better with the kicking and flicking better than I had anticipated and he was certainly having fun seeing how high he could jump on the ballroom floor which had apparently passed the Bobby Bounce Appraisal

however sometime around the middle of the routine the dance became less about fun and more about taking out his frustration with an air drum interlude (there were far too many air instrumentals going on, Buswell)

absolutely no part of any song by WHAM! warrants that facial expression, the boy was just having a bad time possibly because he’d realised the green girl Wiggle was absolutely outshining everyone else in this routine – she had tits and she was going to make sure you knew about it

absolutely nobody was working as hard as she was in this routine, she was doing the absolute most at any given moment and she will be ripping all of this footage from the Iplayer and adding it into her showreel AND GOOD FOR HER, nothing but respect for my Queen of Blackpool Week.

Judging-wise we started off with a typical Blackpool Week scoring with everyone probably adding 1 extra mark to their scores for ~occasion~ – you could tell this wouldn’t last long because Craig was already shifting uncomfortably in his seat and grimacing through everyone else’s critiques

clearly someone left their glittery hemorrhoid pillow at Elstree and he was going to make sure it was everybody else’s problem by the end of the night.

SCORES:
Craig: 8
Motsi: 9
Shirley: 9
Anton: 9
TOTAL: 35

Angela Rippon & Kai Widdrington
American Smooth / Tea For Two – Ella Fitzgerald

Mission Accomplished, The Albatross has landed, Angela Rippon made it to Blackpool and was unceremoniously dumped into her third Death Slot of the series (both Ellie and Layton have managed to avoid the fabled running order guillotine thus far) but Angela being given it the second time in 3 weeks was basically Ol’ Yeller-ing her. You give her one final Grand Day Out – walk her down the promenade, let her bore Kai with her stories, buy her fish and chips on the pier and tell her to watch the sunset and just hope she doesn’t feel the whack. She felt the whack

I cannot believe that Angela’s ENTIRE narrative has been leading to Blackpool to give her the full circle moment of going from hosting Come Dancing 40 years ago to performing the sort of American Smooth that Judith and Walter from Kettering who handmade their own incredibly ugly costumes and practiced in their garage could only ever dream of only for her to come out and just do the wettest of farts

ANGELA, YOU LITERALLY HAD ONE JOB!

She really did get the Game of Thrones progression didn’t she? And Much like Cersei Lannister it all started a bit YAAAAAS QUEEN! and then sometime around the point where she sold her soul to the devil it all started going a bit tits up before she got buried beneath the rubble of her own hubris

what exactly was the small print in that contract she made during her Rumba? I hope she at least got a pony for the motor skills she clearly sold down the river styx as she bumbled through the last quarter of the routine like she was confused because Tesco swapped the Bread Aisle and the aisle for Home Essentials and now she can’t find her pre-sliced wholegrain or the bleach

Shout out to the woman in red who was similarly flummoxed about what the hell had just happened

not even Angela’s ostrich feather pool floaties could stop her from drowning in big band choreography but the judges were going to toss her as many vaguely complimentary life rings as they possibly could (Craig was telling her the door was too small)

MOTSI MABUSE, WASH YOUR MOUTH OUT WITH SOAP YOU DIRTY LIAR! Not even Kai believed a word she was saying

The only part that didn’t look wrong was when Kai just held her aloft like he was crowning her the new princess of the Pride Lands for 5 whole seconds while everyone at the table behind her looked bored out of their minds at the apparent bisexual speed date that this afternoon tea was (not my favourite backing dancer of the night though, she was politely golf clapping the gallantry of Kai saving Angela from her own feet)

I will never get bored of the Strictly prop department dressing every single afternoon tea themed dance with whatever Mr. Kipling and bakery items the local Tesco Express was stilling selling at 5pm on a Saturday – none of it is ever dainty, those eclairs look like the sort of hotdog you get at an American baseball game and that choux bun is as big as Michelle.

SCORES:
Craig: 6
Motsi: 7
Shirley: 7
Anton: 8
TOTAL: 28

Layton Williams & Nikita Kuzmin
Couple’s Choice / Ain’t No Other Man – Christina Aguilera

It’s another whiplash of a VT to Routine transition as Layton goes to visit his family who are so delightfully normal they didn’t even bother to put the biscuit selection onto a fancy plate

and from his tearful, proud grandfather Dennis

BAM! Corseted pole dancing in “step on me!” boots

LEG EXTEND THAT, RIPPON!

This was an absolutely impeccable use of the Couple’s Choice Can Literally Be Anything, We Stopped Caring 5 Series Ago Uno Reverse Card and it’s a little bit funny that Blackpool Week always spends so much time focusing on it being the Mecca of Ballroom Dancing and following Angela’s VT which probably got a budget from the BBC history department, we get a routine that would probably have burst into flames if it were performed in the Tower Ballroom 40 years ago

it’s literally everything that middle class Britain feared in the 80s: pop music, homosexuality and pleather. Not that all of Nikita’s pole work was particularly sexy, he was clinging to it like a scared tarsier because anything raunchier may have broken broadcasting standards

The one downside to it all is you did have to grit your teeth knowing that at the end of it you were going to have to listen to Anton DuBeke talk about it – thankfully someone had taken his pen away so he was just staring at a blank piece of paper instead of doodling a quick life sketch of Nikita slowly sliding down the pole like a sexy pigeon that just hit your living room window

I love it when a routine ends or starts focusing entirely on the pro because they know that’s who everyone has the hots for, – Layton is a very good looking man but if we’ve discovered one thing this series it’s that everyone loves alt fashion Nikita the most out of all the Nikita variants

shut up, Louis XVI cosplay is alt fashion to me.

The crowd very much went bonkers for it – with the routine garnering a similar reaction to Fleur’s 40 winning couple’s choice last year – standing ovation, raucous applause and TessBot wondering where they put the pole dancing shorts they made Nigel wear during Movie Week (YEAH, WE ALL KNOW WHERE THOSE CAME FROM VICKY)

next year’s Children In Need headline fundraiser will be Tess Daly doing a 48 hour pole routine – she owes Vernon after she snubbed him finishing running a 116 mile Ultra Marathon the day before, WHERE WERE YOU TESS, WHERE WERE YOU!?
And in the maelstrom of prematurely going Full Horndog Tess Mode before she hit the Argentine Tango, she made the mistake of going to Craig first and he rained all over this parade because there was literally 2.3 seconds of content in which Layton and Nikita were out of sync

which is frustrating but it does give me another “You have crushed this poor man’s soul, his life is ruined” screenshot – HOW DARE YOU CRAIG, HIS GRANDFATHER WAS LOOKING SO FORWARD TO THIS *checks notes* BUMP AND GRIND EARLY 2000S MTV MUSIC VIDEO THAT YOU WATCHED IN AWKWARD SILENCE TRYING NOT TO MAKE DIRECT EYE CONTACT WITH ANYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM

and somewhere between the crowd chanting “40!” over and over again and the professionals starting to yell at him with the ferocity of a flock of seagulls who feel entitled to your fish and chips

Craig did seem to regret the fact he’d already buzzed in that score of 9

but by Motsi rules she was throwing every paddle at him so it was at least an 84

I’ll allow it.

SCORES:
Craig: 9
Motsi: 10
Shirley: 10
Anton: 10
TOTAL: 39

Ellie Leach & ManBearVito
Charleston / Love Machine – Girls Aloud

Last year Vito triumphed in Blackpool and much like a candidate on The Apprentice after spending 20 minutes skimming a 120 page info pack about Hever House, was convinced he had the authority to give Ellie, who has spent all week talking about her family trips to Blackpool, a guided tour

Ellie did quickly commit a tour guide mutiny before Vito took them down a wrong turn and they ended up running for their lives like Motsi apparently did for most of Saturday evening

and thus their evening was spent in the arcade spending the allowance money they got from dangling Bobby upside down and shaking him vigorously

Dianne is going to be so mad at him, he’ll be cutting his own crusts off for weeks.

Their funfair adventure would continue into their dance where Ellie was deemed worthy of wielding Thor’s Big Glittery Hammer which gives me hope for lobbying for Video Games Week in which I can get a Paso Doble to the King Dedede theme – although looking at the current cinematic climate I probably only have to wait another 4 years before Nintendo throws that property in the ring of film adaptations nobody wanted or asked for

ELLIE SMASH!
Her prize for hulking out being a bear of her choosing…

I have been informed that finding Vito attractive is apparently problematic which would be a more believable angle if they weren’t leaning so hard into the whole thing by doing things like this – THEY KNEW WHAT MAKING VITO BE A BEAR WOULD MEAN, HALF THE AUDIENCE IS GAY MEN! But it is interesting to know that Strictly has its very own medium-sized “no kink at pride” discourse. Can you people just vote for Bobby in silence?

The Charleston is one of the best dances for Blackpool Week – they always benefit from the springier floor and make good use of the extra dancers with Ellie and Vito’s dance going from Panic! At The Funfair to corporate away-day trust exercise very quickly as their lifts and stunts became increasingly unhinged and more and more about just throwing Ellie

much like her salsa, a fair amount of them were just a case of Ellie closing her eyes, holding tight and hoping for the best

I did scream at that last one because I thought something had gone horribly wrong as Ellie slid down Vito’s leg like a cat doing everything in its power to not be put in the travelling crate because it knows it’s going to the vet. In Vito’s Charleston salad I imagine it’s the unpitted olive that keeps you on your toes

my favourite part of Vito’s salad chatter was Graziano looking increasingly concerned about Vito’s horrible idea of a salad – he’s been to Ask Italian, he was triggered

there have been civil wars in Italy over less than what belongs in a Panzanella

Craig had a few quibbles about Vito’s salad tossing (ahem.) too, and because he had chosen violence this evening was determined to ruin everyone’s Blackpool weekend – or one of the seagulls stole his 10 paddle, you know what they’re like

but even after the critique about the timing, Tess was still doggedly trying to manifest that Blackpool 40 and she was rapidly running out of options because Angela Scanlon has had a turbulent series and Nigel’s relationship with Ballroom is basically one of the more awkward meetings on First Dates – he’s accidentally said “I love you” and dribbled red wine down his chin

but I admire her determination in the face of absolute fruitlessness

it doesn’t come out in the screenshots but Motsi’s eyeroll after every single one of Craig’s not-10s was very cathartic and if he doesn’t whip it out soon, she’s going to make him eat that 9 paddle.

SCORES:
Craig: 9
Motsi: 10
Shirley: 10
Anton: 10
TOTAL: 39

Angela Scanlon & Carlos Gu
Argentine Tango / Back To Black – Amy Winehouse

Last year the Blackpool Week weekend was a complete washout – the entire country was covered in torrential rain but still, nothing could stop them from filming their Blackpool attraction VTs, as Carlos and Molly Rainford’s Stunt Double found out

this year they had better weather so Carlos could at least enjoy being subjected to a series of funfair attractions that do feel like they could come apart at any given moment – it’s all part of Pleasure Beach’s charm

(everything reminds me of him)

disappointingly absolutely none of this VT had a single moment of Argentine Tango footage – you know how much they love a niche and absolutely unerotic location to practice them

and sadly the lasertag carousel that they were performing their tango within didn’t come with a single medium-sized futuristic carousel horse

although… that ponytail…

sometimes a dance can be between a man and his favourite metaphorical horse but before I make this routine sound entirely unsexy (too late?) this was a good amount of steam – it certainly passed the Tess Daly Horndog Test with flying colours

and she was already all limbered up from the BBC-friendly pole routine, so she was absolutely ready to run in there like Angela doing the flying spidermonkey leap

initially I was disappointed with the lack of extra dancers because I think you could do a lot of very cool things in a group Argentine Tango but I also respect that the band of travelling choreographic pack mules didn’t want to go near Angela with a pair of knives strapped to her ankles

Carlos claims the tears were because of the overwhelming positive feedback they got from the judges but he does actually need to go seek medical attention for the lacerated achilles heel

and while they’re at it, can the medical team help with the bedazzled head wound that hair and makeup inflicted Angela with?

they really love doing this and I don’t understand why, it’s not fun to get to the end of the routine wondering if someone is going through every emotion from erotic euphoria, a bout of the giggles and murderous rage because that’s their emotionally unstable tango persona or if they’re suffering from a severe concussion

(I love the drama of the whole thing but the moment Angela accidentally looks dead down the camera and really struggles not to laugh was my favourite part of the routine – a perfect capturing of the terror of being perceived)

speaking of concussions though, the judging… Once again, Craig was on a very different page to everyone else – Motsi, Shirley and Anton all thought it was absolutely perfect, the latter two were particularly rowdy over her demi-points which is what I call my boobs now

Craig however thought her legs were too stiff and not reactive enough to Carlos’s movements… Carlos made it very clear how he felt about this particular critique

and while Motsi did her best to pretend Craig didn’t exist and proceeded to lavish praise upon the two of them along with Anton and Shirley, Craig was having his very own Principle Skinner moment

and thus the 8 vs three 10s feud was born

Annabel very much not getting the vibe… Babe, nobody is clapping.

SCORES:
Craig: 8
Motsi: 10
Shirley: 10
Anton: 10
TOTAL: 38

Nigel Harman’s Near Death Experience & Katya Jones
Quickstep / It Don’t Mean A Thing – Duke Ellington

If you’re wondering what a man whose favourite sweet has probably been a Werther’s Original since he was 8 years old does in Blackpool, it is of course go for the vintage tram ride

and of course because he’s closing the show he gets the Big Band Quickstep because they were too cowardly to give him a samba harkening back to the last time he was in Blackpool

there’s always musicals week…

So with Nigel geared up to do the most GIVE ME A PART ON THE WEST END! Routine they could possibly muster and the guy living his best life because once again Katya was letting him jump off the furniture

it was all going so well, he was hitting the accent work absolutely perfectly but sadly the entire routine can’t be jauntily adjusting your bowtie no matter how how hard Katya tries to make it so

and it’s a quickstep so Nigel did have to confront his archnemeses – footwork and hold (the most reliable lawyers in town!) and sadly for him one of their runs down the ballroom was like his feet were having an argument

nonetheless he and Katya were absolutely stoked by the end of the routine, I haven’t seen Katya this happy since she got to the end of a Mike Bushell routine without needing an ice pack for her toes

and Tess had to go and ruin it all by something something stupid like “That really felt like a fitting ending to our Blackpool Extravaganza! Was it Craig?”…

TESS, WHEN WILL YOU LEARN? Complimentary Judge Sandwich! Always start with Motsi or Anton, they’re not going to kneecap anyone straight out the gate!

oh Nige… REMEMBER YOUR MINDFULNESS TRAINING! Sadly he’d lost the keys to his meditative mind palace as none of the judges came to his defense against Craig like they had for Angela Scanlon, Ellie or Layton and all Nigel could think about were the three people he’d employed to manage the Nigel Harman West End Role Hotline and the lack of calls they would be getting

it really did just get progressively sadder and by the time it came to doing his “VOTE FOR ME!” face directly to camera the man was fully contemplating volunteering as tribute to take the place of Angela Rippon in The Great Blackpool Ol’ Yeller-ing (and Angela Rippon doing nothing to hide her delight over the slight silver lining to her Blackpool week)

“Did you see that Kai? Somebody else coCKed it up as much as I did!”

but don’t worry, the emotional support Vito was on the case!

Help, I’m having an emotional crisis and I can’t get up, whatever shall I do…?

SCORES:
Craig: 7
Motsi: 8
Shirley: 8
Anton: 8
TOTAL: 31

The Results Show

I’m just going to tag a short summary of the results show in here because I watched it again and there really is not a lot of content to be mined from it because they decided the pro routine was going to be a show choir style medley of Harry Styles songs for a routine that looked like a tin of Quality Streets vying for the sweet release of death in a CATS!-style deathmatch talent show and the whole thing is a sort of amorphous orgy of purple

Weeks of “Blackpool is the home of ballroom!” and they give us none of it, had this routine been done on a regular week? I probably wouldn’t have complained but it seemed odd to completely omit a big frothy ballroom number for… morph suits and painted fedoras.

As for the couples that avoided the bottom two and are archived within the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery…

with the first couple in the bottom two being Dianne and Bobby

which they did specifically so they could capture the shocked reactions of Layton and Nikita who will always give a truly Oscar winning performance to finding out whoever is in the bottom 2 but this did feel particularly genuine

this week was a real test as to how well Bobby is actually polling in the votes and it seems not as well as I initially expected but his fanbase may have spent all of their reality TV voting allowances on the Big Brother final so we’ll see if they can save him and his contempowaft couple’s choice which I am telling you right now, I am not touching with a 20ft barge pole if it’s as on the nose as they made it sound on It Takes Two.

Of course facing Bobby and Dianne in the Dance Off were Angela and Kai – who could *possibly* have seen that coming (Nigel apparently)

and there was no way in Hell they were surviving a third dance off especially against Bobby and Dianne but FUN FACT! This is the first dance off that Dianne has ever won without having to rely on the other couple committing Jive seppuku so we were of course saying goodbye to Angela and Time Travelling Kai who are going to spend another lovely 50 years travelling through the 1930s together

I’M ON TO YOU SIR!

and into Week 10 we go!

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