And wardrobe never saw this coat ever again.

Welcome to the Soft Reboot, we’ve got fun and more nipples that you probably anticipated!

The Great Reboot has finally arrived! But it’s only a Soft Reboot – we may have lost My Boy in the divorce

but we did get to keep the absurd asymmetrical jumpsuit situation

it’s like Tess Daly is in the room! The main advantage of getting Johannes as 1 third of the hosting Cerberus is that we do get treated to much more Johannes fashion

it was always a bit of a highlight to see which new and interesting way he could deploy a kaftan on the It Takes Two sofa, which is now helmed by Ellie Taylor

and if 5 episodes a week of that isn’t enough to sate your Strictly fix, there’s a direct to VHS vodcast with Tyler West and Abi Clarke partially recorded immediately after someone is eliminated which, given that this must end up being recorded at like midnight, feels like a violation of the Geneva conventions

Fleur East and Janette Manrara sitting at home realising that everyone except them now hosts an official BBC Strictly Spin-Off. The Vodcast feels very surplus to requirement but my God if I don’t admire the knife edge of mess it walks. Can you IMAGINE if Tom Skinner had to give an interview straight after his elimination last year????? Granted, the cast this year seems pretty level headed

I don’t really see any of them writing a notes app screed about how it was the DEI that done did it to them and not the fact they danced like someone shoved a whole turkey in a microwave. I think Shaun Wright Phillips can accept that he’ll go home first because he dances with the urgency of the dribbling tap in a Nando’s toilet and it was not because of the sword wielding lesbian agenda

we did it guys, we finally manifested Gay Nancy!

The big speculation leading up to the show proper was how having three hosts would work – there were wild theories of Johannes running around backstage with a microphone like a rat trapped in a maze in the hopes he occasionally bumps into Katya pointing a gun at her partner until he promenade steps like a professional

if it works, it works!
Instead, Johannes has taken on the role of Claudia in the Johannes Loft Conversion where he has to interview Cach Mercer like someone trying to squeeze blood out of a rock

my guy, you are going to HAVE to use more than 1 syllable at a time!
Which leaves Emma and Josh doing all the work that 1 robot used to do but I appreciate them supporting independent human artists in the face of the AI slop takeover

although I will hold the new logo at an arm’s length because to me it looks like burger van’s ai menu where everything looks a little bit like it might have worms in it

Emma is a natural host, I had absolute faith that she’d slot into the role with zero trouble. Josh Widdicombe is a slight mystery and often feels like he’s there as a Make A Wish kid experiencing sensory overload

Johannes calling him “Joshy” isn’t helping – every time he says it, I feel another sliver of my life being taken away. But aside from showing straight men that it’s fine to like Strictly because look, dad, the least annoying member of The Last Leg is having fun! We even have fist bumps now!

Emma, you have NO IDEA where that’s been

Josh’s secondary role on the show is to be the Universal Punching Bag

and I’ll give it to them, I think it works quite well! Both in that it means less attention being drawn to Anton and it softens the devastating critiques like Shirley telling Shaun to “Work on your personality!”

KEEP THE FOOTWORK? Shirley, he danced like Grandpa Simpson operating a pair of baked potatoes!

Alexis was doing this poor man absolutely no favours by pointing at his feet that were barely moving <3

Shaun did a very important purpose of recalibrating the evening as by this point we were four dances in and kind of baffled by how high the standard was. Except for maybe Sarah and Julian doing a Quickstep that in hindsight was most definitely worth more than Shaun dancing with the demeanour of a frozen prawn

he only has Anton and his pity Latin points to thank for not getting the sub-15 it deserved

and the same goes for Melanie who had cashed in every single one of her Gavin and Stacey reference tokens on the first episode

Everything I know about this omelette is against my will and if I hear about this godforsaken fishing trip ONE more time I’m going to start subtracting 15% of her public votes! Which luckily for her didn’t matter this week because if Johannes saying “nobody is going home this week!” seventeen times like a parrot that just learned to talk didn’t clue you in, there was no public vote this week so everyone gets to dance again next week, yay!

and further in the theme of this just being blended and reconstituted Strictly Nuggets, Week 2 is now Movie Week so Shaun doesn’t even get the sweet relief of not having to dance while dressed as the koala from beloved family film, Sing 2: Sing Harder

this is crazy person behaviour but I assume it’s so that we get more of a gap between Movie Week and Halloween Week but I wouldn’t put it passed them to have done it so that they can slip a new theme in there somewhere. So I hope you’re all ready for Easily Licensable Play For Today Week in which Chris and Amy end up doing a Penda’s Fen themed Couple’s Choice to Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius

it somehow makes more sense than really, REEEEEEALLY stretching the pun of “No Roots” by Alice Merton for this hairdressing tango

between these bangs that are a BOOM and Alexis’s post-Mormonism fuck-ass bob I am very grateful for the “I’m having a mental breakdown, give me a haircut!” representation

and week 1 is for Career themed dances like Tango! At The Salon and what else are you going to do for *checks notes* the inventor of “expensive hair”

I can only imagine THIS was not the expensive phase

this was off the Hungarian Wikipedia because up until being announced for the cast, Chris didn’t have a Wikipedia page and given the amount of utterly superfluous details, I can only assume his well-conditioned and expensive new one was written mostly by Chris himself. None of it is quite as deranged as Rhys Stephenson having Ancestry.com as a citation though.
Of the two tangos this evening, Chris was the lower scoring mostly because every single one of the judges came with their guns loaded to call him a Ken Doll

which is almost generous considering a significant amount of this tango was danced like someone trying to wrap a space blanket around a praying mantis going through the most traumatic moment of its life

It started a lot stronger than it managed to finish, I think Chris kind of clammed up halfway through, possibly because he realised the fringe was a mistake and kind of made Amy look like a fancy show chicken every time they did a dip

I feel your pain Amy, if a breeze so much as wafts my absolutly laquered in place fringe, my day is ruined. But this tango was unfortunately also never going to *really* be able to compete with Jaime Winstone’s power lesbians doing industrial amounts of coke in the bathroom tango

and my god was she going to ham up this performance for every cheap seat in every theatre across the country – you have NO CHOICE in feeeeeeeling all of these emotions

this show has over the years managed to gaslight us all into thinking Disco Tangos are… a thing, so naturally this very Communal Cocaine Bowl In The Green Room dance was the right side of dance fusion for the judges

whereas Maddie having Cach Mercer do just about anything to stop him from doing a quickstep goes against everything that Strictly is about

and yeah, it’s kind of over when Shirley Ballas starts telling you that your ballroom looked like Gilkison’s refried nachos

I’d start looking into the middle distance and contemplating Movie Week fur-suited seppuku too

as much as making Cach dance like he’s one of those giraffe toys that collapses when you press the bottom is probably not the way to go in Week 1

I don’t think it helped that the entire thing is further muddied by the bizarre decision known only to the ferrets in the ball-pit that choose the themes, to have themed the whole thing as a bride escaping a Las Vegas wedding shed chapel

Who was Maddie jilting at the alter dressed like this? HORACE HORSECOLLAR?

it makes very little sense and does feel a little bit like Maddie was set up for failure because what else are you meant to do with a Bruno Mars song, this Bugs Bunny in Carmen Miranda drag dress and a wedding chapel but lean in heavy on the rock and roll freestyle? She probably deserves more credit just for having Cach come across more confident and dynamic in this routine than I thought possible given the Sisyphean task talking to him seems to be

my brother in glittery Christ, you have to do more!

NO. TOO MUCH. There’s a middle ground between 😐 and this level of heterosexuality.
Given the baptism of fire that the judges wrought, the score wasn’t all that bad, even if there was only 15 seconds of quickstep, it was a perfectly fine 15 seconds of quickstep

and I actually quite enjoyed the sort of zoot suitin’ rock and roll of it all (I personally wouldn’t call it “street” and I think that was a… loaded critique from Shirley) and if I were Maddie and I saw the next routine was a bizarrely kink adjacent cha cha cha being given 24 mostly because of fun and vibes

I would go lock myself in the Katya Jones Torture Closet™ and scream until I popped a lung! What do you mean I get the Wedding Chapel Wendy House and Lauren gets the gay club called “The Doghouse” and trans puppy-girl bar, the combination gay club called “The Doghouse” and trans puppy-girl bar and all I got was to marry a series of out of copyright Disney characters!

I’m going to sit here and patiently wait for the prop designers to explain to me exactly what a “Ball Party for Good Boys Only” is

and you can tell that Josh Widdicombe has never seen the show because he had the nerve to ask if this was the best dog-themed routine where someone had ended up with a bone their mouth that the judges have ever seen

I’m afraid so long as he isn’t crawling seductively across the dancefloor wearing a basset hound costume and a leash (WHEN WILL YOU DO SLUTTY FOX AND THE HOUND?) it doesn’t even scrape the top 10! Which is mostly made up of Gorka discovering things about himself even if it is just this gif 10 times

I imagine the only real reason they weren’t dressed as dogs because if they were, Lauren popping the most OBSCENE squat halfway through would’ve read very differently if she was dressed as a whippet – I mean, it still doesn’t look great but it would’ve looked worse with a tail on

and if you’re worried that Softly Rebooted Strictly is too serious to dress people up in weird costumes anymore, I can only point towards everything happening with Lawrence’s outfit that feels like the story of a bankteller being taken hostage told through the medium of chiffon and polyester

which might be apt considering he’s seemingly a professional kidnappee

but don’t worry guys, it’s “Kidnapping (ha-ha!)” not “Kidnapping (sad)”

by the third time you find yourself strapped to a chair in someone’s shed, you also have to see the funny side, right? or at least start questioning who on the writing team has a thing for seeing Lawrence Robb tied up. And I hope he’s ready for Lawrencenapping Number 4 because umm… sir

it was after this performance that Katya decided she was going to take John and a twelve gauge shotgun backstage to make sure he knows that he’s about to do the foxtrot of his goddamn life

I have no idea what she’s saying, but I am choosing to believe it’s a very approving “filthy” because this paso doble was sluttier and sexier and it had any right to be given he was dressed in the eliminated outfit of a Project Runway challenge about redesigning the uniform for the Bank of America. I think the only thing that kept it from scoring above 20 was that it was fourth in the running order and the judges can only really blow their loads (eww) around Dance 14 where we start treating 8s with a level of gravitas usually reserved for a 10 after a trauma-laden Couple’s Choice

me when I’m being very serious on the Saturday night dance show

Motsi only being on my TV for a quarter of the year is a grave injustice

The other thing potentially holding Lawrence back was that it may have just been too soon for a third nipple to hit the Strictly dance floor after we opened with prolonged eye contact from Will Best’s quite frankly cracking pair of tits through his cleavage flossing vest

we need to work on the nipple pacing for Week 2, lads.
I don’t quite know why we’re sambaing in leathers and Lion King merch that you’ve made a little sluttier for showtunes night at The Vauxhall Tavern and I’m not entirely sure Will did either because he danced the whole thing with a face like a baboon trying to get a peanut out of an enrichment toy

but he did look like he was having fun and honestly, at this point in the competition it’s just nice to see someone who doesn’t have The Fear™ in their eyes

the opening number largely just being “there will be joy” repeated over and over again in hindsight sounded like more of a threat than anything else

they said “there will be joy” and Alexis apparently heard “there will be land ahoy!”

I went ginger last year mostly because I was VERY envious of Alexis’s hair and I can’t lie, she is making me consider the bob and the last time I did that I ended up looking like the murder waif from Arya Stark’s nebulous gap year plotline that never went anywhere

speaking of Game of Thrones (not every segue can be a banger) we’ve actually managed to get someone from the Westeros Cinematic Universe into the ballroom after last year’s attempt ended before it started!

Bethany, this had better be worth it because they paid to license actual footage from RuPaul’s House of the Dragon Race

the set dressing is still very Legally Distinct Targaryen but it wouldn’t be Strictly if large parts of it didn’t feel like they bought knock-off party supplies from Aldi’s middle aisle

I adored this routine, the sort of slightly folksy jank that Nancy had given it came across really sweetly. As much as it was definitely a quickstep, it also felt a little bit like it could be danced around a maypole as two girls in medieval Castleton were ~realising~ things about themselves

blāw is þæt wearmeste blēo.
I think at this point, Bethany is certainly a contender for a long run on the show, she’s started at just the right level of competent but not outrageously ringery like the likes of imminent Bottom Two Goddess of the series, Jaime Winstone who is maybe too good and has the same slightly mad eyes of Ashley Roberts. Bethany feels very on the level of Ellie Leach and the partnership with Nancy is extremely cute

90% of that research is the banned Baela x Moondancer fanfics on AO3. “But, Ariadne, Moondancer is her dragon?” to which my answer is to just hold uncomfortably long eye contact. Hey, it’s more fun research than Aljaz had being strapped to a chair with his eyes pried open until he accepted that Gavin and Stacey is funny

I would rather be rocketed down a hill at an alarmingly number of miles per hour on a hot wheeling ironing board with not enough protection to make the insurers comfortable

the second of our new roster of pros is Mark, who is mostly just teeth and a Canadian accent – every time he smiles I feel like I’m being flashbanged by a Colgate advert

he does seem lovely though – like they crafted an AJ Pritchard in a lab to undo all of the evil the current AJ Pritchard is doing over in America and on his financial advice bedroom podcast(????) proving you either die the cringe actor on Hollyoaks or live long enough to become James Jordon 2: GBNews Interview

Mark and Mark’s Teeth would NEVER!

Mark certainly had a better introduction than poor Maddie katya-ing too close to the sun – honestly, Maddie probably could’ve done with having a Jive this week given that Cach seems to excel in the more freeform rock and roll vibe. But Jive Number One went to Mark and his partner, The Stig

who is of course Tabby Stoeker who continues the trend of sports women coming out and doing phenomenal week 1 Jives

I thought she was going to be good, the sports people usually really throw themselves into the competition and come out swinging

…there’s always an exception that proves the rule, ok? But she got the first 7 of the episode which did come from Anton who does tend to respond to anything fast and shiny like a baby watching Coco Melon

it was a relief because the two of them looked ready to go throw themselves in front of traffic after Craig’s four

I imagine it helps a little bit when you’re the only couple dancing a specific genre on the night – for the most part it was an evening of Quicksteps and Cha Cha Chas with a couple of tangos and Dani Dyer unleashing 365 days of pent-up Strictly rage out through the medium of a Frutiger Aero Samba

only to be completely bodied by Delta Goodrem closing the show two dances later to her Samba-themed Samba in what looks like the lobby of a high-end Japanese restaurant

the only ~unique~ routines of the episode were Tabby’s jive, Lawrence’s Slutty Corporate Bondage Paso and John McTikTok doing the Alex Warrenest Foxtrot to ever Alex Warren

it may have been a very beige routine but what I did appreciate was that it was sweet and sentimental without having the reality TV baggage of being dedicated to a dead relative or the weirdness of dancing to the same song that was the first dance at your wedding (Adam Thomas, I still have SO MANY questions) unless I missed that particular dedication because I was too busy rubbing my hands together like a raccoon washing candyfloss over the search engine optimisation of “Katya Jones taking 16 balls to the face”

I have to game the algorithm through smut and clickbaiting filth. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Katya’s training methods have always been… unusual and often tangential to medieval torture which brings me nicely to my new segment Weird Training Room Wardrobe Watch, beginning with Katya as the owner of a Vegan cafe and yoga studio in The Shire

Nancy dressed as an uncut foreskin (WHY IS IT SO FLESHY, DOLL?????)

and Nikita’s One Very Warm Leg

will I remember to keep this bit going? PROBABLY NOT but I needed something to take the place of the Monkseal Memorial Safety Sex Face Gallery for at least one episode – we are not ruling out the possibility of another non-elimination episode given the hit rate of last year. Dani Dyer is forbidden from moving by herself between dances as a result

I have to applaud the bravery of moving Dani around like studio flat furniture when the ADHD hits at 3 in the morning while Danny Dyer (The Dad Version) is in the audience looking like he’s there to whack someone in the carpark

personally I would be more threatened by the woman on the far left

or Delta bringing along the most Australian looking man you’ve ever seen

that’s a man that’s inured to the concept of fear because he’s seen spiders the size of a Pomeranian. And my god were they taunting his jetlag by making Delta go last in this 2 and a half hour show – the duality of Strictly fans who love the show but also hit that Christopher Nolan runtime and start pondering if maybe we should defund the BBC a little bit

I GOT BUM CRAMP, ROMESH.

And budgets cuts are getting bad at the BBC – everyone’s got two jobs. Josh moonlights as the censorship bar

AND HE’S SLACKING

Lacey’s doing a marginally better job at sweeping up all the glitter after the show

because, as we have established, week 1 is Careers Week and “cleaner” is one of Stacey Slater’s 11 jobs

release the Webcam Model cha cha cha from the Banned Concept Vault, you COWARDS. It did end up being the highest scoring Cha Cha Cha of the evening, getting a very impressive Week 1 score of 27

and I’m sure it was good, she certainly looked very comfortable during the routine, but it also helped that she had an outfit that did A LOT of the talking for her

don’t get used to it Lacey, it’s Movie Week coming and someone’s getting the distressing Rumba between Jessie and her horse to Taylor Swift’s credits song from Toy Story 5.

Speaking of Movie Week, I’ll see you then!