Extremely useful screenshot.

Welcome to Theseus’s Strictly Come Dancing.

We’ve arrived! And it’s a good thing they didn’t leave the usual 2 weeks between Launch Show and Week 1 because God knows how many more contestants would’ve had their lives claimed by Ian Youngs, Culture Reporter to sate his hunger for eternal youth

I would personally never talk to my ankle ever again. Achilles thinks he has it bad? At least he got to die! Dani Dyer has to sit at home every Saturday night extremely aware that she’ll have to wait for Celebrity Big Brother to get that kitchen extension now. We call this Angellica Belling, who will only do Strictly when she feels the need to get a conservatory and indoor gym.

So with Dani Dyer becoming Dani Died, they did have to go and measure every ringer in town who could possibly learn a routine in under 24 hours. Enter Amber Davies of Love Island, Dancing On Ice and West End fame who would spend much of the live show off somewhere practicing a waltz in a broom cupboard

I believe this does mean that as well as Dani Dyer’s ankle, the Strictly Come Dancing x Dancing On Ice pseudo-grudge is also dead! Lady Leshurr can do Strictly now, it’s not a pipe dream!

So now that everyone was finished fracturing something, all that was left do was work out how to start the show. Kind of wild to have the opening shot being cooked pork

this isn’t even a Thomas Skinner joke (it kind of is) but it does cut straight from the fried bacon to him continuing to do his cockney geezer social experiment (we’re calling this edit “Chekhov’s Dickhead”) all by himself. Dani Dyer deliberately broke her ankle to save us from her dad and Thomas having to do a social media bit together. She’s basically Jesus. Which means she will rise again in about 3 series time, God bless. I also don’t want to give the show too much credit because THEY DID CAST HIM, but making Thomas Skinner dance to a piece of music called “Battle Without Honour or Humanity” is excessively funny storytelling.
We get a sort of run through of everyone’s morning activity – Nitro’s entire personality this week will be The Gym, La Voix spritzes perfume, Balvinder desperately doesn’t want to speak to her taxi driver because Julian is doing her fucking head in

Stefan Dennis sensibly brushes his teeth while Alex Kingston takes her mirror ball shark for its morning constitutional saunter

and Chris Robshaw does… this

which will be more movement than he’s capable of in his samba. And if anyone is in the need for more fanfiction inspiration (I’ve checked AO3, I know you’re all doing fine) but Harry, George and Lewis all share a dressing room

I’m just sliding that along to you in a manila envelope. You know what to do, you filthy animals!

The start of the show proper, is Craig giving us a whirlwind tour of the 1970s through the 1990s – we do not broach the subject of the 2000s or 2010. All of this is primarily done through the medium of the best wigs we’ll see all season, which still looks like they slung a lapdog over Neil’s head and called it quits

and Craig is sort of just modelling the haircuts of the BBC Newsroom – you’ve got The Moira Stewart Bouffant

The Natasha Ka-fucking-plinsky

and The Kate Silverton Chunky Highlights

get ready, it’s all downhill from here because we’ve really peaked with Aljaz trying to balance that precarious Agatha Christie murderous butler moustache.
It’s also some of the best outfitting they’ve ever done – these quickstep dresses are the stuff I dream of seeing every week on Strictly

I know Vicki Gill and the 13 monkeys trying to write Shakespeare she calls seamstresses are hard pressed to outfit so many couples every week but I don’t know, is too much to ask for 200 yards of more tulle, one time? The show can save up some money by just having Tess borrow the rest of La Voix’s bathroom furnishings

the resignation on Tess’s face as she short-circuited from the realisation she’s in for a good 10 weeks of this if La Voix plays her cards right

phenomenal work from La Voix. I for one fully support her complete mutiny of the show. It’s La Voix’s Strictly Come Drag Racing, now. I do also live in fear that La Voix is going to steal all my joke, but she didn’t point out that Motsi seemed to be dressed as a anatomically correct human heart

don’t ask where the pulmonary valve is.

I guess I have to finally acknowledge where the dancing starts. *Usually* you might want to start off with someone middle of the road, doing a competent dance with a fun theme. NOT THIS YEAR. I wasn’t able to watch live, I was down in London drinking absurd novelty cocktails

but I did see a lot of talk about how low the scoring was this week, with it being the lowest scored week in the history of Strictly, if we all agree that the Covid Series was a feverish cheese dream that doesn’t count. And I looked at the cast and was wondering how that could be with at least 5 or 6 people that would easily land in the mid to high 20s (Lewis, Amber, Alex, La Voix, Nitro – this list is NOT what happened) and then Chris Robshaw started dancing like an arthritic wrist trying to do “I’m A Little Teapot” and I realise what had happened

I screamed in horror the entire way through having to watch this ironing board drown in the icy waters of the north atlantic

the only thing I could focus on to prevent me from completely losing my mind was Nadiya’s boots going around like she was being chased by a pair of particularly rowdy maltese poodles

I admire her for being able to smile through having Chris just crashing into her and gyrating with all the hip rotational ability of a Tasmanian Giant Crab

they didn’t even give HIM a fun outfit to hide behind! It’s like Legally Non-binding Rugby Uniform 2.7 – the cowards wouldn’t even make it Harlequin adjacent

absolutely horrible dance, you probably shouldn’t be making people do a Samba in Week 1. But also an absolutely perfect start to a truly cursed series, 10/10. I have no notes, Chris Robshaw is still hot and seeing him be goofy only makes him hotter

and then we’d have to wait 5 more dances to get something actually bona fide-ly good as Lewis broke the 25 point ceiling, immediately laying claim to the Billy Elliot Musicals Week routine like a dog pissing on a tree

give it to George Clarke, I want to see Lewis Cope cry.
It was a bombastically good jive – possibly too bombastic, Katya continues to be Katya and as soon as she gets a competently good dancer, she will make him flop and flip around the dance floor like she’s turning him into a pancake

Katya is actually possessed by the ghost of a medieval torture device and Lewis will be more pulp than man by Week 5, but even with Katya choreographing a Jive that would kill most men stone dead, they still only got 7s across the board for it

probably because he hit angles like he was a mathematical compass in a production of Chorus Line

that last move is a mystery to me, he looks like he bent down to tie his shoe and went light headed (been there) it looked like a mistake, but I’m also sure it probably wasn’t? Katya would drop him on his head if it was

I do actually really enjoy the more reserved marking – for the first time in a LONG time almost half the contestants scored below 20, which feels correct! And Ross King barely scraped above 10 as he and Jowita got the rarely sighted Double 2 paddle

and even that felt a bit generous. He did have the uphill struggle of having to follow Lewis Cope doing self-inflicted chiropractory upon himself. But as a treat Ross at least got a medium-sized slide for absolutely no reason other than to have him spend slightly less time on his feet and more time slamming his ass into the ground like the meteor that killed the dinosaurs

he was dancing to California Girls by Katy Perry because he’s from California and the WHOLE TIME you had to sit there bracing yourself for the Snoop Dogg verse because, oh yes, Ross King is doing hip-hop

this did translate to him just putting on a big fur coat and looking more like a Labubu than a hip-hop idol

and there’s a moment where the judges are just perfectly illuminated behind them – Craig looks like he’s ready to kill this routine there and then, Motsi is grimacing, Shirley are actively recoiled and Anton is biting his nails

literally more of this dance is just Ross standing there, waiting to be dressed by Jowita like he’s gone senile than there is Hip-hop content

SIR. SHE IS 6 FEET AWAY FROM YOU!

At no point did Jowita see this man dancing like he was spamming a free Fortnite Emote and think “Maybe we should ask for the Snoopless version?”

she just continued to beat that poor dead horse.

And speaking of poor dead horses…

unfortunately the Elstree Winch

I said “Winch” not “Witch”.
Unfortunately the Elstree Winch had broken so La Voix had to try her best to make just sitting on a condemned and defunct carousel horse look as dramatic as possible

it not lowering from the ceiling really accentuates its faffing aboutedness, SHE’S JUST SITTING THERE! NOT DANCINGLY! At least Ellie got to violently wiggle around in a coat like a sack of ferrets fighting over a carrot for like 10 whole seconds

La Voix was doing an American Smooth and I did find the VT interesting about her not getting to train in full drag because FUCK THAT

which does make Kitty Scott Claus having to show up and cook in full drag week after week on that one series of Celebrity MasterChef where they refused to eliminate her no matter what very funny. I am however tapping my feet impatiently waiting for the week in which La Voix has to put Aljaz’s brick face into drag and for him to be united with Kai as the bloated corpse of Dua Lipa

I want this photo framed and signed by him.

La Voix was also doing it to Pink Pony Club, which I did think might fall onto the Forbidden Playlist of Strictly but it is perfect for a drag number and oh boy, was this a drag number! And I’m not just talking about the lift that looked like Aljaz was dragging the defunct medium-sized carousel horse in for maintenance

and the rest of the dance wasn’t exactly elegant, but who on earth is trying to play a routine to a Chappell Roan song elegantly? She was leaning far more into her comedy chops

it was a genuinely funny routine that did also do its best to showcase technique and I think Shirley could’ve maybe saved the “stop being domineering and showboating” critique one week just to see how La Voix plays a second week. I do think she has to potentially learn when not to interject – you could see she was DYING to say something when Neil got dragged out like a sad Soviet Union circus bear and made to tell us about how all the voting has gone online this year

which isn’t the only change! There’s also a Super Amazing Ultra Gaggy Dance Off Twist™ which comes across as more of a schism within the judging panel that the show is desperately trying to mend than anything else. Basically the completely pointless title of Head Judge is no more, which mercifully means Anton can no longer call Shirley “Lady Captain” but each week the judge who gets to cast a potential deciding vote changes. It’s messy and I can’t see this being a lasting change given it will be possible to say “well, if Craig had been the head judge this week X wouldn’t have gone home!” it might make the judging panel more equal but good lord is it going to upset some pros and fans. Just bring back live Result Shows, it’s all we want!
I did just mostly enjoy the combination of contestants used for the VT announcing this twist, which is clearly filmed before The Dany Dyering because Amber, Alex and Ellie are all absent so I imagine Dani, Alex and Ellie were a throuple

which policule are you going home with?

Much like Chris, Balvinder was also thrown into the Week 1 Samba Meat Grinder but at least she’s got Julian with his incredible track record over his three series of Dancing With The Stars in Australia

well fuck. What an absolutely baffling resume to get a job as prestigious as Strictly with, how on earth did this happen?

yeah, that’ll do it. While we’re talking about Hot and Weird Julian, the way the teaser trailer was edited so that he jumped into the pool and then it cuts to Alexis under the water? Oh mama, that’s so gender

please, baptise me in the Unclockable MtF Transexual Pool like Achilles, leave me with my one butch ankle that we call my Man-kle.

Balvinder and Julian’s samba was Not Good™, as you can probably tell from me doing everything to not talk about it – shall we discuss Hot and Weird Julian’s Lucky Undies instead?

or Balvinder also getting a Big Coat, in the form of Pete Wicks’s hand-me-downs (I hope she managed to get all the baby oil and Dior Sauvage cologne out of it)

it was clearly very nippy in the Strictly Come Dancing studio

trend alert: Big Coats and body popping like a chicken with the hiccups

I thought Julian left Balvinder alone on the dance floor for FAR too long for an extremely new dancer to be left unsupervised. You HAVE to treat dance to these people like you treat unpeeled grapes to a 3 month old because they will try to eat a botafogo and they will choke on it. And I can’t really argue with these 4s which rolled in as Julian getting a 2nd elimination to round out his collection of booby prizes played before his mind

they were in good company with 17 points thought as Ellie and Vito got the exact same spread of three 4s and a 5 to two palpably different reactions

but Ellie’s and Vito’s routine was a lot more fun to watch because Ellie looked like she was enjoying herself and much less like her partner was trying to herd a farmyard bird suffering from acid reflux

Ellie also has genuinely good musicality, it’s partly just her enthusiasm really selling it and sure there are timing issues galore and a tendency to hit the floor like it owes her money but I have a good time watching her. The partnership with Vito of course also seems lovely and like he’s trying to give her the best Strictly experience and creating a bespoke 12 course tasting menu – the Chicken Spicy followed by the Ellie Special sounds divine and you even get a moist towelette!

He seems to have adapted training for her really well and If the BBC ever has to start selling things on Ebay to keep the lights on like ITV does

I will be sniping the auction on the medium-sized Tess Daly cardboard cutout

I imagine nobody’s getting the Claudia one because if they can’t lower La Voix’s medium-sized horse-in-drag from the ceiling with a week of prep time, we have to accept that medium-sized Claudia Winkleman is just stuck in her eyrie forever

Harry might be able to get her down?

they were really getting all of the obvious themes out of the way early: Ellie gets her runway, Vicky gets to Vicky

Thomas Skinner gets to march without honour or dignity and Harry gets to go to De-branded Pure Gym at 10pm on a Tuesday

now, the obvious issue for Harry is that he is just the 1980s Heman action figure that became a real man and the evil wizard that did it forgot to give him him more points of rotation and as such he does sort of move like one block of plastic

but there were clearly bits of the dance that he preferred and that he’d practiced a lot more – I think he just wants to jump, it’s what makes him happy

that and push ups, my God. Almost enough push ups to have me actively root against him – I don’t want to be reminded of PE, sir

I still can’t quite believe after having a big emotional moment about how this was sort of his big return to Prime Time after sitting out a series of Gladiators, that they then used him as a doormat

his score was probably the most surprising to me – I thought he and Karen would breeze above the 20s on vibes and pec bounces alone. However, I do think their score of 19 was more accurate – whoever is spraying the judges with cold water you’re doing a great job. Now just make sure you get Tess who I think felt every part of Harry’s arm, powerless to the defensive layer of baby oil

contrast to two feet of daylight between her and Thomas with hands straight done like an unactivated NPC waiting to give you a quest in the middle distance

that’ll be the TessBot Mach 5 Dickhead Detector upgrade – your TessBot has never been better at dissociating

she does take a while to reboot.
This all happened because of the technical difficulties with La Voix’s Medium-sized Gay Horse (I’m very happy for My Boy) and I do like that it seems to imply that:
A. They know not to let Tess vamp for time anymore.
B. Tess was waylaid because she was responsible for engineering the horse.

The Horse wasn’t the only slight prop issue as despite Kai’s extremely careful blocking and positioning, they weren’t entirely able to avoid Vicky’s big name in lights giving us the ick

much like Balvinder, I think Kai did leave Vicky up on that stage alone for a little bit too long – Vicky I think was able to bluff through it a little better but I did feel like I was watching a woman screaming through her teeth for Kai to save her during the end of her solo section

it was a perfectly fine beginner Cha Cha from Vicky – she had really good straight legs, she didn’t manage to balance it with a particularly good hip action but she and George both did a great job of doing exactly what they were meant to be doing of being perfectly fine competent natural dancers. Vicky is slightly easier to root for on account of the show deciding that George’s entire existence begins and ends at social media – there is now man, there is only algorithm

you have to give us something else, my guy. You cannot just be the one and only 24 carat gold labubu of the cast, that’s Ross’s thing!

I guess we just have to be thankful the whole routine wasn’t a social media themed American Smooth and they instead just went with Stargazing by Myles Smith, which Wikipedia informs me was a popular sound at one point. Vicky does however have some catching up to do in the Great Strictly Mime War of 2025

quarter past 9 already? Someone go get Amber from the broom cupboard! She’s on in 5!

it’s really no wonder Nikita had to be locked in a padded room in order choreograph this 24 hours waltz

This routine does also make me think that yeah, we probably should see more Week 1 waltzes because in less than a day Amber and Nikita made this out of 7 cans of Red Bull, 3 packets of Ibuprofen and whatever they could hoover up in the green room like Noonoo the Vacuum cleaner

I mean, we shouldn’t really be surprised, they did just run through the West End grabbing any woman who was 5’1″ like The Hooded Claw trying to capture Penelope Pitstop

The interchange between Dani and Amber is less drastic than the swap from Kristian to Lewis. Dani and Amber are the same woman in different barely different fonts – Dani is just sans-serif Amber. I still think one of the pros that is benched wasn’t meant to be benched because I think Kristian was probably going to have a male partner? Kristian’s back died so that Neil couldn’t dance. He’s like second Jesus.

Much like the addition of Lewis, Amber does also make this seem like more of a competition – Amber, is still absolutely the Designated Bottom 2 Goddess of the year, I can feel it in my bones. But we needed another certified ringer to combat some of Lewis’s appeal. And then on top that, Karen Carney, after navigating the stairs like a praying mantis with peg legs on launch night, came out and DID THIS

it takes A LOT to vie for attention with Carlos prancing about in in slutty little shorts as we lose him to the peroxide blonde demon twink within that I’m not entirely sure this show is ready for – this is like when Nikita discovered just a blazer can be a whole outfit

(very me playing rugby and immediately getting demoted to halftime refreshment bringer-oner)

but Christ, she was phenomenal! And the show informs us that with 31 points, this is the first time a footballer has topped the leaderboard since John Barnes and Nicole Cutler did a Cha Cha Cha as a pair of rubber chickens

I’m not fact checking that, against my better judgement I will trust them. Also, the speed at which Claudia had that fact to go makes me want to start a conspiracy theory that they deliberately dampened other couples’ scores to keep Karen up there as a method of luring in more of the women’s football team, like when you move a queen bee to get the hive to migrate (guess which side of YouTube I’ve been on!) We keep losing Lionesses to I’m A Celeb, we can’t afford to lose any more!
And it was a twofer on good footballers as the show just threw footballing spaghetti at the wall to see what stuck. Lauren and Jimmy’s was a more, well, ballroom friendly affair with the two of them looking sharp as fuck in their Chelsea Blue suits

and of course dancing to Chelsea Dagger by the Fratellis – it’s a wonder they didn’t have Chelsea Heeley running across the ballroom halfway through with a tray of Chelsea Buns in a pair of chelsea boots. It was definitely a classier affair than Katya hanging Tony Adams from the ceiling like a novelty Christmas bauble

unshockingly, the general concept of football fits slightly better with a quickstep than a tango

and it was a very good routine! Lauren might honestly be the best thing to happen to Strictly since at least them allowing themselves to have an audience in the room again. She does very interesting and fun choreography, even if Jimmy’s face suggests he was having a horrible time

if he ever manages to dance without looking like he’s watching out for the next turn-off on the M5, he’s golden! I do worry that the Quickstep in isolation is incredibly well tailored to Jimmy’s strengths and the moment they drop him in Latin (probably next week) he’ll join the whalefall of ironing boards in the Marianas Trench that Chris Robshaw was thrown into. However, Jimmy at least has 4 personal trainers at home as he locks in for Family Wars

I am so interested to see how far Girl Dad Jimmy leaps in the popularity poll this week considering he barely registered to anyone in the pre-launch and I still don’t think he’s actually ever watched the show

I eagerly await the very concept of Movie Week smashing him in the face like a Looney Tunes pie – he and Lauren could be a genuinely fab Bonnie and Clyde. I think I just want him to be in good suiting every week, they’ve practically got the costume already and he and Johannes are surely about the same size?

this is somehow not a tango nor Phantom of the Opera fanfiction (I think?) and is somehow a Michael Bublé Viennese Waltz for the soul reason of the song being Cry Me A River and Alex Kingston having played River Song in Doctor Who – we’re maximising that SEO, baby! Dianne’s out here playing checkers with Stefan’s Neighbours Themed Foxtrot

and Johannes is playing chess hat frisby

FOILED! They cut away during the fling! I mean, obviously Johannes didn’t throw that hat, it’s clearly from his own personal collection and very expensive! He had to sell parts of the Viennese Waltz to afford it, specifically just about all of the in-hold parts

I LOVE the Viennese Waltz, it is the dance I’d dream of doing on Strictly (Halloween Week to Grave Mistake by Ice Nine Kills if someone else snaps an ankle and they need someone who can dance like a corpse to fill their spot) but this just didn’t read as a Viennese to me, it was interesting and dynamic and gave all the drama I kind of want from an Alex Kingston routine

I just don’t know why they didn’t give her a tango? They CLEARLY wanted this to be a Tango, it might even just be Dan Walker’s Call of Duty Map Tango in drag

I think about that routine a lot for some reason – I think it’s one of the only examples where an excessive use of the AR scenery actually really helped the routine. However, Alex doesn’t need AR, she had a real lamppost, that I did think went sadly under utilised. I like it when they have to swing around it and it always teeters, dangerously threatening to kill the inhouse trombonist

perhaps it was also meant to lower from the ceiling?

Lastly we have the most Australian thing to happen on TV since The RayGun Social Experiment (I’m still convinced it was a ruse) as Stefan and Dianne foxtrotted to the Neighbours theme on medium-sized Ramsay Street with a pair of used and strangely unbedazzled garden shears for Strictly

and with Dianne showing so much and Stefan getting the “You’re really good at Musical Theatre!” critiques ALREADY

they are absolutely going to try and crash this man on the jagged rocks of Party Latin before Halloween. But the core and extremely dedicated Neighbours fanbase (The SteFans, if you will) should not be underestimated – if they manage to work out that online voting, Stefan is here for a while. Dianne can just choreograph more sitting down

she can’t roll around on the floor anymore, my favourite recurring Dianne move, so I look forward to seeing her new and creative ways of throwing in a little sit down during a nice-man-death-salsa.

And if you’ve made it this far – you can have a little treat! After this week, who do you think it going to win the show?

and next week, right after the Main Show ends and phone voting opens, I’ll drop an exit poll to see who you gave your three free online votes to. And every week, starting next week after the first elimination, as well as checking to see if your predictions have changed, I’ll be asking your favourite routine from the eliminated couples, as well as their best and worst outfits. Unless it’s Thomas Skinner, he’s excluded from the polls. Without honour and dignity.