Strictly for everyone...

5 April 2012

You know you're approaching senility when you start thinking that Alzheimer's is a German beer, when you're able to play Hunt the Thimble all by yourself, and when you start complaining about young people playing their music too loudly.

So it's ironic that the most brain-splitting electronic noise ever broadcast on TV came not from the amplifiers of some clashmetal rock group, but from that veritable sacrarium of senility, the House of Lords.

Legend has it that at the start of the first day of the BBC's test transmissions, when the mikes were thrown open, 100 aged peers simultaneously cranked up their hearing aids and a cacophonous squeal of eardrum-destroying audio howl-round whistled through the Upper Chamber, as though their Lordships were a bunch of geriatric Hendrixes at Woodstock.

Which may well explain why, even now, most members of the Upper Chamber seem to be profoundly deaf to the public mood.

There was audio howl-round aplenty on BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing but the show was mercifully free from the signs of senility that marred its previous incarnation.

Whenever I watched the original Come Dancing, I swear I could smell wafts of Dentufix and Wincarnis emanating from the elderly gumming audience who sat motionless at tables each week, staring at the Penge Latin Team or the North London Formation, but now the format is back on our screens, and it's been miraculously revamped for a new century.

Like its presenter, Bruce Forsyth, something that once seemed over the hill has now been revivified, and thanks to the inclusion of celebrities and phone voting, it's providing quality Saturday evening entertainment of a type that BBC1 traditionally excelled in, in the days before Noel's House Party dragged the slot woefully downmarket.

Although speaking as someone who has never really mastered the art of joined-up dancing, I personally find that I get quite enough of writhing bodies, flailing limbs, grimaces, and noses thrust into armpits every time I travel during the rush hour on the District Line.

The judges geared themselves up to leave no turn unstoned as Brucie walked on. "It's the clash of the costumes," he promised, as he introduced us to the pro-celebrity couples competing on the floor of that geriatric Mecca of the North West, the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.

And with that we were treated to the uplifting sight of soap stars and newsreaders attempting the jive and the tango, accompanied by "live" music of the sort that once accompanied provincial cinema ads for local carpet shops (courtesy of Laurie Holloway and his Orchestra of the Living Dead).

Introducing the dancers was "the voice of Alan Dedicoat", addressing us in precisely the same undulating and menacingly matey tone he adopted when saying "coming up, a triple rollover" on the National Lottery afterwards.

And given that one of the competitors was David Dickinson (a man so oleaginous that he leaves a slick of grease behind him wherever he goes), a few triple rollovers from the dancers who followed him onto the floor also seemed well nigh inevitable.

Unlike the minor stars on Hell's Kitchen (who regard all criticism as an excuse for yet another tearfest), these celebrities approached their task as though they were doing the Hokey Cokey, putting their whole selves in, shaking it all about, and apparently thriving on the pressure.

Lesley Garrett rehearsed her tango with a paper mask on (she said it was to keep her partner's cold germs away, but it could henceforth double as a much-needed sordino, to quieten her can belto voice when she sings into a microphone), while Natasha Kaplinsky danced a mean jive despite serious misgivings about the length of her skirt (which was, in truth, more of a thick belt), and even Dickinson tried his best, although what he was doing wasn't strictly dancing at all, it was just walking with jazz hands.

Better still, when the judges tried to point out the performers' myriad faults, the audience simply booed them, with the public phone vote that followed turning the official decisions upside down, and quite right too.

After all, this is a democracy, and think how much better our society would be if after Lord Hutton (for example) had pronounced, he'd been booed off screen, and his verdict overturned by popular demand.

During Greg Dyke's reign, BBC1 travelled shamelessly downmarket in its insatiable greed for maximum audience share, but lately it's been regaining the balance between quality and populism that every public-service broadcaster needs to strike.

This programme succeeds in that aim because it is absorbingly watchable kitsch that cunningly uses wellknown faces to bring in a new young audience for ballroom dancing, while also satisfying the older brigade of viewers who still reminisce endlessly about the glories of Sixties television ( even though they're mostly the same people who hated it all at the time).

Of course, professional ballroom dancing has always been a thoroughly bewildering affair to most of us, being practised by men who wear trousers so tight that there's no ballroom dancing, and women with fixed glacial rictus smiles ( otherwise only seen on the faces of synchronised swimmers and old miserly gentlemen who died during free sexual intercourse), and attracting many competitors from the most impoverished and overcrowded of social backgrounds.

Why? Well, some experts argue that it is because dancing is a form of escapism, allowing the poor to forget the bleakness of their material circumstances, but my theory is far simpler. If you grow up in a house with 10 children and only one lavatory, then you learn to dance pretty fast.

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