Strictly: my schoolgirl crush

Oh how bloody marvellous. The woman whose very name conjures up images of complicated Victorian undergarments, Darcey Bussell, has joined the judging panel for the last few show of Strictly Come Dancing. I know she’s had a staggeringly successful career as a prima ballerina, but since I don’t give a stuff about ballet, its not her pas de deux that impress me. It’s more that she seems a genuinely decent, down to earth sort. And for a beautiful, frighteningly bendy and really rather elegant woman, she’s not afraid to send herself up. She did this particularly divinely in French and Saunders a few years back. I find Bussell to be warm, straightforward and competent, and gorgeous too of course. Like the head girl we were all secretly in love with.

So now she’s sitting pretty (and defusing a few handbags at dusk) on the judges’ desk between Craig Revel Horwood and Len Goodman. We got two shows last night. In the first, the remaining four couples performed two dances apiece for the first time, and in the later show, we got Bette Midler, Vincent and Flavia doing a thoroughly dirty and most excellent Argentine tango, a group dance that will for ever remind me of the Summer Time Specials of the 70s, all of which built up to the dance-off. Laila and Anton were going to be in it for sure, despite the most fabulous purple dress, they didn’t have a good night. The other couple should have been Chris and Ola, but they are so popular with the public, it wasn’t. It was Ricky Whittle, despite an almost flawless couple of dances. I guess the public were not keen on his extra curricular activities in the previous week.

So unless Ricky cocked it up massively, it was going to be farewell to Anton and Leila, and so it proved. They are an endearing, but also rather odd couple. There was the early ‘Paki-gate’ story, which they survived. Leila sprained her ankle one week. She is the most extraordinarily beautiful woman, who looks spectacular in every outfit, be it a tasselled cat suit, or an elegant red swirly number. Anton is an odd looking chap, who seems to have been beamed down from another planet. She asked him once if he sleeps in his tie. You don’t get the white hot sexuality off him that you get from Ricky, but Anton is very funny, and he and Leila seemed to have grown genuinely fond of each other.

But they were the right couple to go. Now we’re left with Ricky W, Chris Hollins and Ali Bastian. Everyone has had Ricky down to win from the beginning, but I’m rooting for Ali. I’m less keen on her partner, Brian, who seems rather controlling (it may just be that he’s American and so upfront about how competitive he is, I’m not sure) but she seems a decent, plucky sort, and she works her socks off every week, despite two injuries.

Posted by Inkface