The entire recap is just this.

Jowita, are you ok?

Previously on Strictly Come Dancing: The Bamboleo Samba Counter ticked up to 6, The BBC got trigger happy with the blur tool, Shirley Ballas recreated the 2008 press conference between George Bush and Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi at the Republican Palace of Baghdad

and the Blind Date themed Charleston to a Post-modern Jukebox production of “Ooh Aah.. Just A Little Bit” ended exactly as anyone could have predicted

it truly was a very special kind of unwatchable and the fact it lost to Shaun doing a quickstep that was neither quick nor step really elevates it to High Art worthy of being projected on an endless loop in a dedicated room of The Tate Modern.
As a prelude to Stars In Their Eyes Week, here’s a reminder of the celebrities before they activate Incognito Mode by donning a series of wigs that look like they were fashioned by a group a dog-groomers-in-training, which we shall do through the medium of a back-dated Week 3 Monkseal Safety Sex Face Gallery

This week it’s Icons Week so everyone is dressed up! On the judging panel we have The Gallagher Brothers, The World’s Most Comfortable Beyonce and Shirley looking a bit like your entire collection of reusable shopping bags gained sentience

huge fan of Motsi absolutely telling Shirley that’d she’d love to be Gaga and Beyonce from the Telephone music video only to nope out of that immediately because there is no way on God’s green earth that she is doing a micro-bang

and the hosts were getting in on the fancy dress action with Johannes coming dressed as The Concept of Christmas, Emma as someone who has fully accepted that Johannes is The Fashion Host and Josh as the primordial soup that every cousin at a wedding spawned from

the icons for the couples were just as a much of a mixed bag, not because I want to dispute the icon status of Your Aunt Wendy From Dronfield

but while artists like Bowie, Elton John and Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 lends themselves really well to Icons Week

someone like Adele is a little less so? The iconic things about Adele are her singing voice, her talking voice and the photo of her in Bantu Knots and a Jamaican flag bikini which to this day I cannot believe isn’t a doctored image

and unfortunately I don’t *think* Adele really has a samba banger unless you wanna do something really weird with Rolling In The Deep. So the only things you have to sell the Adele fantasy are a black dress, a blonde wig and… that ominous mirror that follows her around?

and Vito seemed to have realised that in amongst the furore of Dianne throwing Elton John spaghetti at the wall in the hopes of hiding the fact Will Best could not Jive his way out of a cardboard box in the signature Dianne Buswell Intermission Where The Routine Goes To Absolute Shit and starts feeling like you’re watching the last two children left at the school gates having to make up a game to amuse themselves

and Graeme Hall dressed as Biblically Accurate Camilla Parker Bowles

the dance-themed Adele routine could easily get lost so he made sure to get the tits out for Adele and Mirror Adele to fight to the death for

and I feel that perhaps getting lost amongst the throng of slightly giddy Icons Week overmarking was unfortunately exactly what happened to Bethany and Nancy who had much the same problem with Aretha Franklin as Lacey had with Adele

this is kind of just any Strictly Motown routine as Bethany becomes the barer of That One Wig They Give Any Woman Of Colour For The Inevitable Dreamgirls Routine – this may well be The Ghost of Tabby Stoeker’s Musicals Week Future

in true Aretha style, it’s a case of Lovely Gowns, Beautiful Gowns with Bethany looking absolutely sensational in this dress that may well have drained the UK’s entire reserve of bugle beads

and she did at least get the big Aretha loofa coat that has immediately gone on Nikita’s wishlist for the inevitable return of Instant Dance: Just Add Water

but with Bethany landing 3rd last on the leaderboard ahead of Dani and Nikita who have an incredibly activated fanbase and behind two different sets of ties because the judges can’t help but clap like seals if anyone does a Couple’s Choice

or does a Salsa that feels like you’ve huffed glue on a Scandinavian Airlines flight

I know I’ve already declared the ugliest dance of the series to be Will and Dianne’s Foxtrot that was performed like the video of that guy having a meltdown because his World of Warcraft subscription got cancelled and he tried to shove his TV remote up his ass

but MY GOD does does this flat-footed fight to the death between piles of chiffon and satin give it a run for its money! The most impressive part of it was that they actually managed to find a second life for Karen’s bizarre Macarena Pants

I truly never thought that they would ever manage to make it out of Vikki Gill’s Vault of Sartorial Curiosities, so I’ll keep a candlelit for the hopeful return of Iveta Lukosiute Intergalactic Space Whore costume that lives rent free in my head

you cannot tell me that Jowita wouldn’t put that on in a heartbeat. Although maybe not for a couple of weeks because she has a NASTY bruise to cover up after Lawrence used her as a sledgehammer

it was honestly very hard to think about anything else that happened during this episode after Lawrence, so possessed by the primal sex appeal of Ricky Martin, absolutely smashed Jowita into that dancefloor like he was trying to kill a fly with a rolled up magazine

can we call this “a lift”? She was certainly airborne but I do believe at the point Jowita loses all agency in her projectile arc, it becomes “a throw” – Olympic shotputters are not arguing that they’re “lifting”

but I really don’t see how this could end in any way other than being a finishing move from Mortal Kombat. But despite Jowita hobbling off and spending the rest of the show looking like she’s 7 boxes of Paracetamol to the wind as her coccyx recovered from a concussion as she tried her best not to slip into the sweet embrace of death

Shirley was incredibly impressed by Lawrence’s partnering skills

ma’am, did you miss the part where he suplexed Jowita into a different millennium? I’m convinced that Lauren fell into their impact crater

the jury is out if this is on purpose or not, to me it very much looks like a failed trust falling exercise.

I think a lot of the excitement for Lawrence stemmed from the fact that last week his Abandonment Trauma Rumba went down with the last vestige of the Rumba Monarchy like… well, Jowita at the end of their Ricky Martin Death Salsa

the critique was largely that it was mostly Jowita running around with Lawrence doing very little movement when he wasn’t behind the Rumba Obscuring Fabric Wraiths

so if Jowita was going to do one thing this week, it was make sure the judges felt the same way the dinosaurs did during their mass extinction event

bravery is Alexis letting Shaun who dances like a Jellycat plush toy perform lifts with her, foolishness is Jowita looking gravity in the face and laughing – sometimes she can get away with it, like the Madonna pro routine in which I don’t remember Madonna having a Zero Gs phase but go off queen

and other times, the laws of physics will apply to you 10 fold

the entire recap could just be 5000 words about this lift medical emergency, it is the most exciting thing to happen on Strictly since Cynthia Erivo decided that her greatest contribution to the Strictly canon would be the masterpiece that is The Evisceration of Tom Fletcher

and I fear that Bethany and Nancy realising they are very much going to be in the bottom 2 before it has been announced may join Tom and Amy on the Mount Rushmore of Strictly Come Personal Devastation

yeah, the show does not leave you into the last 4 couples two weeks in a row this early on, so here’s everyone that managed to avoid that anxiety in the Icons Week edition of the Monkseal Safety Sex Face Gallery

Bethany did manage to unanimously survive her slip into the Bottom Two both because she is, at least, a passably competent dancer, but also because her opponent was Sarah Storey trapped in the gravitational sinkhole that is a Shania Twain Tango from which I don’t think even the best of us could really recover from

the styling and set dressing are just so… heavy and really made it feel that much more plodding and cumbersome. I genuinely think this whole routine would’ve been so much better even if they’d just not put her in the leopard print tights, just to give some sense of relief from her being dressed in 300 yards of it already! It’s sort of working like drag queen dazzle camouflage

the rest of the styling I’m obsessed with – her makeup is incredible and this Transvestite 101 Wig? An icon in its own right – this was absolutely bought off Amazon and is probably called The Mandy

speaking of which, I have never seen Hot and Weird Julian looking more activated than when he got to strut around in his little biscuit heels and Lulu Lemon yoga gear like he was dressing for the Drag Race Werk Room

PROTECT THE DOLLS.

Given Strictly’s Soft Reboot seemingly being largely about gearing itself very much to courting a younger demographic – please do not get me started about the Tiny Microphones being used by the BBC’s latest attempt to make Fetch happen because I will write 8000 words about why it works on social media but looks absolutely jank on broadcast TV (DO YOU NOT KNOW WHY IT IS CALLED A LAVALIER MICROPHONE?)

I refuse to learn anything about Abi Clarke because whatever the fact is happening in her promo image to launch the Straight to VHS Aftershow Slopcast she does with Tyler West is a moral failure of society

it’s like Gandalf the Grey on Laundry day.
Anyway, before this became an Abi Clarke hit piece (someone has to be a hater) I was talking about being surprised that for a show that *really* wants longevity with the teens who love ballroom dancing and… Shaun dancing like a Shih-tzu that can’t decide which leg to cock

I was going to express surprise that there weren’t more contemporary icons – I think the only one is Raye who was given to Tabby, whomst they have realised she is a certified smokeshow

“but Adele!” I hear you cry and I must take your millennial hand softly in my own, pat it comfortingly and check us into a nursing home. I was also just surprised to see Raye on the line-up because they had a song of hers on last week and as great as “Where Is My Husband!” is as a song, it is an insane torment nexus of time signatures that make it quite hard to choreograph for and I personally don’t think made for a great routine? Case in point Cach’s Couple’s Choice that Maddie could barely cope with and this Samba that I think Tabby did as well as she could until their final stunt looked like Mark was trying to make pretzels from instructions written in ancient Sumerian (welcome to Extinct Languages Week on Bake Off!)

the only thing messier was ending a routine to a song about being tired of waiting for someone to put a ring on it with a shot of Tabby’s boyfriend

and you better hurry my guy, or everyone who is looking for someone to step on them is going to do it instead

the judges were significantly more fond of Tabby’s Samba than I was

but the judges were also on one with the judging this week, as is to be expected with a themed week – it’s why Graeme can go on to score a quartet of 7s for a performance that I feel I can safely say barely should’ve been scraping 5s

I genuinely think Bethany scoring lower than this is probably more offensive than the Protect The Dolls erasure

but she wasn’t the only one to get left behind, Dani Dyer’s Respectfully Chaste Rumba Because Danny Dyer Is In The Audience also got left in the dust because the only time Shirley was going to take her job seriously while dressed an non-compostable Worzel Gummidge is when she can stand up and overexplain a rumba to someone like they’re 5 years old

but if you scurry around like a hamster that got behind the skirting boards in the name of a Couple’s Choice free for all, well baby that’s a free pass to a 7!

the resurrection of the guineapig we’re trying to pass off as a wig is possibly the biggest indicator of the BBC’s current financial crisis. The only place it belongs is 6 feet under and concreted over to make a new inner city car park.
However, maybe I also can’t blame the judges for being slightly giddy and throwing 7s at Shaun because Alexis, seemingly a woman unshackled by the pressure of coasting a milquetoast influencer to the final on good will alone, has taken to choreographing in the same fashion that someone discovered you could drink cow’s milk

this is one of the stupidest pieces of choreography committed to the show since Gleb clambered across Anita Rani like the ceiling baby from Trainspotting

and I wouldn’t change it for the world! Shaun isn’t the best dancer in the world but my God if he isn’t sturdy, like one of those doorstops that are a highland cow with a brick inside it that only seem to be sold in garden centres

if there’s one thing Shaun won’t do in a routine, it’s wobble like you just hung your big coat on a cheap coat rack

and I apologise for once again cutting a recap very short very suddenly but it’s been A Certified WEEK™ and I really just want to make sure what I did manage to write between everything actually made it out before the next show and I’ve also got a Bake Off to do still! Then next month MasterChef The Professionals 2026 Volume 2: Sweat and Vanilla Perfume Portofino Orange Glitter Vinyl starts and I am obligated to recap it because much like the continued success of Shaun Wright’s Guineapig Toupee, they have resurrected Ibz who is MY GUY

this is the second most exciting television event of the year – the foremost being finding out if Ross Kemp yawned or not.