The TessBot Weapons Upgrade has gone horribly wrong!

I take ice cream very seriously, apparently.

Previously on Theme-agddeon (I was going to type Themeageddon but it’s impossible not to read it as a non-binary extinction event) it was Icons Week and the show blew its entire wig budget on Balvinder’s double stacked human hair Beyonce unit, so we’re back in highly flammable polyester town

Aljaz’s fresh out the bag Ariel wig that’s never known the gentle caress of a comb is definitely as bad as it gets but wolfman Liza Tarbuck over there is on thin ice

Oh my granny, what a sensible layered bob you’ve got.

We also said a far too premature goodbye to Jimmy, hence Claudia wearing the traditional mourning garb of the Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink Trouser Situation

how do we solve a problem like Claudia Winkleman’s inadvertent codpiece?

… do you take commissions, Tess? Asking for… a friend…

This Week it’s Halloween Week and TessBot and Claudia’s retirement announcement, much like the ravens leaving the Tower of London, appears to have led to a very British apocalypse

and that true story? Dead Set

as Elstree is over run by a zombie hoard everyone arriving a little bit too early for their makeup call time

highlights of the world’s least effective zombie hoard being Ellie smiling to camera the entire time

the 2.5 seconds we get of Lewis being completely out of focus because he was committing a little bit too hard to the bit and thus was too scary to air at 18:40 on saturday primetime

Vicky and George breaking character IMMEDIATELY

but my absolute favourite part was Harry having enough plausible deniability to say he wasn’t actually a zombie lest God smite

A.) He’s allergic to whatever grease paint they slather everyone in every year for Halloween Week.
B.) He’s a very devout Christian and will not partake in your PAGAN DISPLAYS OF… high school talent shows?

it’s the carcinisation of Dan and Nadiya all over again

but I for one think a Lobster and dabbling in furrydom for the LOLs guys, it’s definitely a joke heh..heh…heh?

are perfectly justifiable Halloween costumes, EMBRACE STUPID HALLOWEEN, YOU COWARDS! Intergalactic Ice Cream Parlour is just undead beekeeper levels of unparsable nonsense – I thought Tess was either having a stroke or reading one of the Telegraph’s cryptic crossword clues

also, let’s be perfectly honest here, Strictly would do Gelato In SPAAAAAAAAAACE! on a casual Tuesday, you have to wait until Halloween for something as special as Mr. October on the Tumblr Sexyman Charity Calendar

I do think the styling for the couples on Halloween Week has drastically improved over the last few years – there was a long stretch of everyone just being garbed in black and an entire community theatre’s production of Great Expectations worth of cobwebs – this time it was just Nancy

It did however only serve to really exacerbate that the judges had shown up for a very different party

apparently there’s some sort of high concept polycule costume where Motsi is the corpse bride being married off to Craig and/or Anton in the scariest costume of all, Carol McGiffin’s Wikipedia Photo

I do not have the time to unpack whatever showreel Anton is putting together to be cast as Widow Twankey in the Buxton Pantomime, so I’ll just move on to the mother-of-the-gender-stuff-Anton-is-going-through

that’s genuinely terrifying? And I wouldn’t blame them if someone’s kids were forever traumatised and refused to watch Strictly ever again. Like when the first episode of The Simpsons I ever watched was Treehouse of Horror III so I just assumed The Simpsons was that all the time

I was a very stupid child but now I do crave a Zombie Shakespeare routine

that’s a challenge for Kai specifically who was far too safe in his comfort zone of looking convincingly like a regency gentleman that spends a suspicious amount of time in a graveyard with the undertaker

he and Vicky had the honour of kicking off Halloween Week, and by “kicking off” I do mean literally – I cackled every time I watch her do this spin with her unpointed foot looking like she’s just hoofed a penalty kick harder than Karen could ever hope to

AND NONE OF THE JUDGES MENTIONED IT! (I blame the novelty contact lenses)

Vicky is of course the obligatory dead wife, a Strictly Halloween Week staple that I do feel we have to address at some point. But not before someone does my dream Halloween routine of a ghost bride Viennese Waltz to Grave Mistake by Ice Nine Kills. The rest of my Halloween Wishlist is:
1. Jive to House of Wolves by My Chemical Romance
2. Charleston to Cabaret by North of Never
3. Paso Doble to Thalassa by Valiant Hearts
4. Argentine Tango to The Death of Peace of Mind by Bad Omens
5. Quickstep to Witch by Burn the Ballroom
7. Everybody Scream by Florence and the Machine not to be wasted on a George Clarke VT

in order to finally feel the thrill of Halloween, because George is the guy that shows up wearing the same Simon Pegg in Shaun of the Dead costume to every Halloween party

George was sent to a Halloween Horror Maze which had such frights as The Freddy Fazbear We Have At Home

and the star of the show: Barbara The Legally Distinct Fashion Doll

I truly cannot think of anything less terrifying than someone jumping out at you and screaming “I’M BARBARA!” – I simply adore her. Can they keep her? Being Strictly’s first throuple could actually make George interesting!

well, second throuple

The Great Cucking of 2019 <3 – I wish I could get the screenshots from Monkseal’s blog at the time but Imgur has also done him exceedingly dirty. The image of Neil Jones sat forlornly on the floor next to his crutches watching Alex and Kevin training for the Ghostbuster routine is seared into my brain forever.

!!! EXTREMELY IMPORTANT UPDATE !!!

The incomparable Helen Zaltzman sent me the screenshots of Neil Jones in crutches watching Alex and Kevin training

my life is a little bit more complete.

Once again, it feels like George doesn’t have much say in anything as the show continues to shove him into a social media obsessed sausage casing like he’s minced Soylent Green, with a Cha Cha Cha to Charli XCX’s Apple because it has a viral dance on TikTok and no other reason. I have begun to feel sorry for George because everyone else keeps hoovering up his potential narratives – Lewis is The Generically Hot Guy Who Thinks He’s Weird Because of His Chosen Career (Have you ever seen me without these show tunes? That’s weird!)

Vicky hoots “I’M JUST A NORMAL GIRL!” in a regional accent at every available moment, La Voix has finally been touched by the divinity of Len Goodman and experienced THE SPIRIT OF DAHNCE! first-hand

you do one coup de pique and suddenly it’s a seance!

So all that’s left for George is to explain dying memes and internet trends on It Takes Two to Janette in her Facebook Mum era

They better give him a 10% pay increase for not mentioning the communal cocaine bowl in the greenroom – the most Brat part of this show.

It feels like everyone else has some say in their routines but with George it’s really starting to feel like Strictly is sort of just happening at him. I don’t believe for a second he could name me 3 Charli XCX songs if he tried and he’s still not actually watched Kpop Demon Hunters. It’s a well known fact that the celebs get to submit a wishlist of their own before their series and I want to see George’s because I feel like he just handed it in with a cool S doodled on it and his lunch order

so the show has to sort of piece together a personality for him like cavemen discovering fire and Charli XCX is very much *not* George Clarke, so this was an Alexis routine that George did a very good job of playing the role of Pole No. 1 in

or just sort of standing slightly off to the side like a child telling their mum that they threw up in the middle of the night (George will explain it to you, Janette) while Alexis hammed it up

and spent a full TWENTY SECONDS of the routine on his knees rotating from one side to the other like a mid-tier cannon in a Tower Defense game

which is honestly kind of slay of Alexis, but girly pop what are we even doing? Content-wise, this is a Week 2 routine in Movie Week clothing AT BEST

my favourite part is that they couldn’t even do the Apple dance properly because the originator of it sued Roblox all too recently

and Strictly can’t afford a lawsuit, they spent all of their money on the all important world building of “In Space, Nobody Can Hear You Ice Cream”

I want someone to sit down and explain the currency of this ice cream planet to me like I’m 5 years old – why is the Stellar Sundae three times the price of the near identical Neptune’s Delight? What are those flavours? What is the conversion rate of British Pounds to Spacebucks? Are those images of ice cream AI generated BECAUSE I’M SUSPICIOUS.
I’m convinced they came to Harry and Karen with the concept for a cute witchy American Smooth. Then Harry rejected it for whatever reason so they did a hard pivot based on the one lyric in the song that says “moonbeam ice cream” and the only place available to put it together at such short notice was Tess Daly’s Back Alley Gender Affirming Care Unit

and thus Karen’s Intergalactic Gelataria and its horrible signage was born

How many fonts do you need for two words, girl? I just cannot believe this of all things was their first option – this is like option 5 of a brainstorming session on The Apprentice that leads to them trying to sell Liquorice and Blue Cheese ice cream to toddlers.
It wasn’t a totally self-induced hamstringing though, they did actually style the whole thing really well

especially given that silver lamé can easily make you look like you’re dancing the lament of a Christmas Turkey, and lord knows it has on this show

I think Harry and Karen both looked really charming and for the most part this routine was equally so. I was disappointed with the lack of acrobatics and gravity defying moves in their Salsa, but these American Smooth lifts were just so lovely and effortless

and the man was born to fly

he did go a little bit wrong at one point – I think he perhaps began thinking about the concept of this dance, it’s enough to short circuit anyone’s brain. The judges were actually mostly very positive about the routine though – they took note of the mistake but didn’t dogpile on it. Harry, much like Karen with her Rumba last week, seemed to only hear the criticism and was visibly quite upset despite a reasonable score

I’m so sorry, but him doing the 6,7 meme (George will explain it, Janette) while on the brink of tears was *a little bit funny*

he was at the bottom of the leaderboard, which I do think was a little bit unfair given George had danced a third of a routine and got an 8 for holding Alexis’s hand good and Ellie’s tango proved why they’d thrown every party latin under the sun at her – which is a very short walk off an even shorter pier

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Harry had landed in the bottom 2 for this based purely on the concept not landing and I was braced for it when it came to this set of remaining couples

I think we knew it was an inevitability that Balvinder would end up dancing again this week, and so did she given that when Tess announced she was in the Dance Off, Balvinder guffawed like a goose

while I was sure it was Harry or Ellie in the dance off with Balvinder, there was a small part of me that suspected we were getting a slightly too hasty Bottom 2 Goddess Off because thus far this series if you were in the dance off the previous week and are safe, they don’t leave you until the final 4 couples. But no, the show just hates Amber

and they have been forced to activate the Emergency Chaos Nikita Protocol in the face of a salsa that you simply cannot wooby face your way through for votes

it’s like Hacker T Dog took party drugs. We’re not such innocent men anymore.

The Dance Off came to a unanimous decision to eliminate Ellie, which was a fair decision because Balvinder’s Rumba really wasn’t a bad rumba – or at least the parts of it she was in control of were good! The cover of “Stay” I would say significantly less positive things about and her only real crime was having to go after Spooky Kurt Hummel scoring a perfect 40

Balvinder has however hit a chronic plateau, scoring her third set of four 7s in a row

and I do believe in slot machine rules so she should win a free car. Or a year long membership to the gaggle of village women who get to stand in the corner for a private viewing of Alex and Johannes dancing to Horny

Alex! Has! Friends!
George! Has! Friends!
Lewis! Has! Friends!
Vicky! Has! Bridesmaids who are hoovering up the front row invites like filthy ticket scalpers

Amber! Has! … UwU Catgirl Nikita?

inside of you are two catgirls

my culture is not a costume!

I’m honestly obsessed with Amber’s narrative on this show – we haven’t been introduced to a single aspect of her life outside of the training room. They truly could not be less invested in her. Which is wild, because she joined the show with 1 day of notice and dug them out of another potential 2 person finale fiasco! Even Balvinder got a cute little family VT and the show has happily given her the same score every week and is all but tapping their watch while standing in the doorway of her training sessions

and this week in Hot and Weird Julian struggling to balance the Hot and the Weird:
Juggling loo roll

and really trying to sell sexy vampire with a set of fangs that are visibly too small for his mouth and you can just about hear the sucking noise of him trying to keep them in <3

everyone else in this pro-routine going all out sex – Gorka’s arse is working overtime for not being here every Saturday to do nonsense in the background

ALJAZ HAS A WHIP!

Carlos and Amy are every lesbian couple that got married in October

and then you turn around and Julian is hissing and sucking on his own teeth like Nosferatu in an advert for Fixodent

MOTHER, I LOVE HIM.

The only other contestant still in the competition to have less humanisation than Amber is La Voix and that’s because she’s quite happy being the pencil sketch of a deranged child and nothing more

And also, that 2 from Shirley a couple of weeks ago did all the humbling a sappy VT hanging out with the 4 men going to All Bar One you call your brothers ever could

so with the show refusing to give Amber a library card to check out the Being Human For Dummies manual from Nancy’s Literary Gloryhole

Amber’s role is now explicitly to just come and do pretty dances and hope to God Nikita doesn’t get his continents mixed up in front of Helena Pedantic-Cartographer over here

DAMMIT NIKITA

D’aww, I can’t stay mad at you, kitten.

I personally really liked this routine, it was overly contemporary but also… Nikita is dressed like he got bitten by a radioactive border terrier, I don’t think this is the week to get picky about the transatlantic bastardisation of dance, Shirley. You were fine with a hoedowning quickstep just last week!

this one half-hearted thumbs up has me signing up as the conductor of the Amber Davies Diva Train

Choo! Choo! Our final destination will be a thorough Musicals Week debasement because unfortunately, nobody is topping this theatre number

there is not a single moment of this Couple’s Choice that isn’t iconic, I want Karen Carney to brain me over the head just so that I might be able to suffer minor memory loss and be able to experience it for the first time all over again

even if it is quintessential insufferable theatre kid energy: The classically TV handsome guy performing to Creep? That version of Creep being minced into a jazz tempo? The distinct feeling that someone is standing on the sidelines fuming that they didn’t get to do this routine instead?

it’s like someone used black magic to resurrect the corpse of Glee. It’s the sort of routine that makes you realise that Couple’s Choice is actually a good addition to the show and sure we have to suffer through a hundred commercial hip-hop routines that Jason Gilkison should be paying reparations for, but eventually someone will open the forbidden theatre jazz cupboard and something like this will fall out

I know everyone goes to the commercial hip-hop side of things because Anton and Shirley will throw 8s at you for literally nothing. But Theatre Jazz is possibly the easiest way to soften Craig

it was a routine almost specifically designed to appeal to him – the moment they did the tap routine on the piano I knew it was a 40

however, those weren’t the only 10s in play as the Peaky Blinders Argentine Tango was significantly better than that word salad had any right to be

I am obsessed that just to really hammer home the Halloweeniness, they still put Karen in full corpse paint

I personally think all the gender fuckery of the routine was enough of the Halloween spirit. It’s Gay Christmas guys, so gather around the fireplace in Cat Burns’s Haunted Sapphic Library and open your presents

I got you a Monkseal Safety Sex Face Gallery, I hope you like it!

it’s a better gift than George awkwardly handing out apples at the end of his routine

the moment he freezes and looks to make sure Alexis is also doing it when Motsi begins asking what the hell is happening <3

rest assured, he was indeed meant to be wasting another 10 seconds of his routine not dancing

I can’t believe that La Voix actually got out-faffed this week, but for some reason Aljaz has chosen Movies and Halloween Weeks of all weeks to choreograph entirely sincere and straight-faced routines. Or as straight-faced as a drag queen baring down on you like she’s just clocked an unembellished H&M dress

I am very sad that we weren’t getting La Voix swishing around her sexy sheet like a cape for this Paso Doble

and this is also probably the closest we’ll get to Aljaz being in drag but, I’ll take it. Veronica Green was on Drag Race doing less

at least they were they were GOOD costumes! Especially when you consider that they’ve ordered a Queen of Hearts costume off Alibaba before and wound up with a deck of cards in a loveless marriage

the costume department was of course greatly benefitted from the fact they didn’t have to make Johannes’s outfit this week. He just stomped into Vicky Gill’s fabric torture chamber, slammed this slutty Runescape Imp costume on the stretching rack she calls a haberdashery table and told her to get on his level

I want to know at which point they realised that Johannes was too powerful in this routine and for the good of Alex getting noticed AT ALL they needed to cover him in the completely pointless cloak for the first 20 seconds?

because Alex was certainly present and doing fine, but it’s Johannes doing a salsa to Horny, anyone would be dead on arrival against him in that situation

he’s mesmerising, I couldn’t look away! My Sinister Spaghetti special went cold!

I wasn’t brave enough to order the… Monster Mash Pig? And somehow Hellfire Ice Cream is only the second weirdest ice cream concept THIS EPISODE.

Are the mods asleep? Can we post ponies? (George will explain it, Janette) because I didn’t think I’d see the day someone would perform to Horny, I truly thought it would be on the Forbidden Routine list if not for the pearl clutching of the Daily Mail and cold water supply of Britain – Derek from Tunbridge Wells has been the shower for 3 days (and that’s just because of Johannes!)

then definitely for the likelihood it would reduce Shirley’s brain to mush

but only for long enough to throw a 9 at this like she’s throwing dollar bills in a strip club before she was back to her senses and able to clock the midwest twang in a Viennese Waltz from 50 paces

the only thing more sobering than someone only dancing 18 bars of a waltz in hold, being the power washer they used to de-drag all of the judges in time for the results show

and speaking of results, here’s how things look on the predictive winner table ahead of Halloween

and you can vote on who you think will win HERE.
And you can also vote on Ellie’s bests and worsts HERE.
(I’m experimenting with just hyperlinking the polls as I had a few people mention that the embedded ones were a bit jarring in the post. But if traffic to them is drastically reduced, we’ll see)

and that’s it for Halloween Week as we begin the journey to Blackpool!