Strictly has been going for eight years now and despite the introduction of the odd foreigner like Martina Hingis and Michelle, the ultimate prize still eludes them: Agnetha Fältskog. Hey, why not? She didn’t say no to a dotty Dutch truck driver who used to send her fan mail addressed to “Agnetha Fältskog, Sweden”. She’s no older than Pamela, she’s younger than Paul, and I’m sure that prime rump steak past its best-by-date is better than new cellulite. I can but hope, probably in vain, because Agnutter does not like to travel either. So I pin my erotic fascination on the phenomenon that is Ola Jordan, the perfect latin dancing doll. Trouble is she generally looks spoilt and demanding with her celebrities and also has a silly accent. Some crone told me she is a Pole dancer. I empathise with the pain of her charges in the training clips, as it looks like she’s almost haranguing them for their faults. When she put her stiletto through Andrew Castle’s foot she proclaimed it was his fault, because he had it in the wrong place. What a charmer! Andrew was very gallant about her, because like the rest of us men, he knows that Beauty Counts. Said beauty is not merely a beautiful adornment or the Icing On The Cake, but it is also Almost All That Matters. (I do beg your pardon for my Overt Capitalisation Disorder). And so I empathise with these fellows’ pain, whilst my tongue follows Ola around the screen and wags about her off it.
Talking about erotic fascination, I notice that the champion bottom-wiggler Lilia Kopilova is not on Strictly this year. I am vaguely aware she’s won some other titles and I’m sure if they were anywhere near as important I would remember them. Even her name invites smutty word association. Of course, no earthly being understands her omission, either for the sake of smut or terpsichorean titillation. Lillia was good! She’s a dance champion, she knows how to choreograph and train celebrities, and she won’t scare the crows. She is even capable of tact and forebearance, definitely in demand when she had the born conspiracy-theorist Dom LittleMan. Lillia is a dance icon who embodies Strictly Come Dancing. But Lillia has fallen victim to the New Broom of Strictly, presumably the same producer who thought up the vile new set which looks like the creation of a child with ADD and a glow-stick. They must have thought that because Lillia went out first with Richard Dunwoody last year, we wouldn’t notice, never mind filly Kopilova’s own pedigree. But I do notice! I would consider a protest of walking around outside the BBC studios with a life-size cardboard of Lilia and a sandwhich board of “Honk if u want Lilia back”, but I think we all know all that would happen is white van drivers would yell out the window “Fuck off you poof”. I wouldn’t be surprised if 8 out of 10 have forgotten her already.
Strangely, the show has retained Aliona Vilani who also went out very early and has a lot more legs. She would be the wicked spider weaving her web around Strictly then. Or perhaps the truth is the producer just wanted to nob her. I don’t think this stretches reality as much, do you?
The beast that is Nataly is still there. Despite having clearly the best dancer of last year, neither her nor Ricky could carry the viewers with them. There’s been some discussion of her in DS with the word “tranny” in there, but I know this cannot be true. I would find it easy to detect, thanks to a special device from the Innovations catalogue called the Upskirtomatic®. You’ll find it between the slacket and the cat-scarer.
What totty does that leave? Oh, I can’t bear it anymore. I’ve got to get to the weighty issues first. Here’s the legshow league table:
Ola
Kristina
Aliona
Katya
Flavia
Erin
Natalie
I’m sure you can believe me when I saw I’ve given the weighty topic the “research” and consideration it deserves. I’ll even assay a league for the celebrities as well. Who said lynxmale lacks generosity? I am the gift that keeps on giving!
Kara
Tina
Patsy
Felicity
Pamela
Michelle
Ann (*sight unseen)
Sneou/=
Sorry about that, my fingers have come unstuck from the keyboard now. Where were we? Oh yes! They had a preview programme again. I doodled some captions to the evidence a few weeks ago if you follow the links. What you really need to know is that this is the highest-profile cast of nonentity partners for years. Sorry again, force of habit, I mean celebrity partners. I mean, I actually recognise most of them, even if only from flicking through the channels when I come back early in the evening. They’ve even bagged Ann Widdecombe! Or maybe she handbagged them instead. It does look mighty strange that she was even asked. I mean, what twisted mind would ask God’s Rottweiler every year whether she wants to boogie for television? Mark Lamarr amused me when he referred to her dodgy documentaries when she beats up on a new soft target of society every week: “My name’s Ann Widdecombe. Be more like me!” If that means living with your mother and cats into old age and never marrying, it’s no wonder her subjects prefer low-grade parasitism. Still, she looks like a good sport. Might not be the one called wife-carrying from Finland though. Spare a thought for poor Anton. Swami Glen Hoddle told me it is his punishment for what he did in a former existence. Ann will make John Sargeant look like MC Hammer. Can’t touch this!
I think the list is
Peter Shilton, Scott Maslin, Jimi Mistry, Gavin Henson, Paul Daniels, DJ Goldie, Matt Baker
Kara Tointon, Tina O’Brien, Michelle Williams, Patsy Kensit, Felicity Kendal, Pamela Stephenson, Ann Widdecombe
I suppose I have to be grateful there are few young women on the list. Despite being a filly-fancier, I do inwardly groan with resentment when I see a cast list with someone blatantly known for being young and beautiful that looks a shoe-in for the final. Contest, what contest? I never did really warm to Emma, Alesha, Lisa or Rod Stewart’s wife. I do think she had a name, so you could find her easier in the swimwear catalogues. The biggest surprise on the men’s side was that they partnered the jewel in the tiara, Ola, with the old turtle Paul Daniels. What perversity! I had almost forgotten about him. I think I remember his spitting image puppet as much. His high voice and bizarre catchphrases seemed trying to cultivate a game of whack-a-mole with his face. He looks a bit like a couple of eyes floating on a lightbulb, except that Paul like turtles has no neck. When someone else asked who else should be expected to partner him, I told them “Your mum”. Some old hand said Ola was bound to draw a “bum note” after winning last year. Paul Daniels is a whole bum Xylophone. Do you know that he has a full page mugshot of himself on every book he owns? I hope he applies the same pride to his dancing. The curious thing about Paul is his deadpan delivery of the humour that he has, that gives the audience few warnings. I can see how this inscrutability was useful for producing a bouquet from your sleeve, but for the general purpose of humour it is ungenerous baggage. It was interesting to note how he dropped a few jokes into his interviews, but the production team was not cued into them and failed to laugh. I did snigger, because I understand comedy and see humour in most things, but his personal distance was obvious even in the documentary he did with Louis Theroux nine years ago. He even claims never to have seen Strictly. This is strange because his wife Debbie started off a ballet dancer, and it is probably the loss she incurred on her failed production that still has him working up and down the country and looking to Strictly as publicity.
He’ll need more than a bouquet up his sleeve. I suggest a cache of paralysing darts for the other contestants instead.
He actually keeps a blog. At first I wondered if it were all a spoof. After all, it’s titled him as “international sex symbol”. Just look:
" I travel the world getting rave reviews for what I do... magic stuff. Then I come to my own country and TV wants me to dance, or sing. What’s with TV? Why do they always want to make people look less than they are? "
Because deluded dwarfs let them?
" I have now spent three HOURS re-organising my diary and circulating it to all those who are in the know about this show. "
He means the Rotary Club.
" I just find exercise boring. I can’t get into it at all. I did have a look at a couple of teach yourself dancing video things on the internet... but I can’t get into that either. "
My Ola-meter is about to boil over...
" For the last couple of years I have been trying to devise ways of clearing my silted creek out that would not break the bank "
??? If this is the euphemism I suspect it is I'm going to barf
Despite all the talk of senility and the suggestion that keeping the doddery old fellow going amounts to elder abuse, the groan machine that is Brucie is still here. There was a rumour that he could retire live on air. I think someone confused “retire” with “expire”. He is the ultimate performer, by which I mean attention seeker, and he’d probably prefer to go that way. Jus’ like that. Doubts have also been raised about his hair. So why don’t we ask it? Just cover the exits in case it tries to make a getaway.
Alesha too is back, with her liquorice weave (don’t knock it till you’ve licked it), fearlessly grappling with the superior force that is the English language. Will Alesha tork propah? Watchoo fink?
They’ve even got a new set, with a room with a view way up at the top of a staircase, except this one doesn’t have much to stop people falling over the side. It’s Tess’s tower of Babble, the new red room where she’ll quiz contestants about their performances and simper about men’s guns, for the delectation of all of us whose toes like to curl. This tower could bring stage-diving to whole new level with the show. After all, you have to have a lemming instinct to take part in Strictly Come Dancing.
As a sign of things to come, the show started with Vincent & Flavia's Wire-Fu. I'm referring to being suspended on wires for Tango moves. Groundbreaking novelty or flashy-trashy? I wondered if the other dancers were enacting a tug-of-war drama beneath them, like trying to pick carcasses off the butcher's cold-store rail for their chest freezers.
Did this go to plan or did they get caught up in the wires like a bad Hong-Kong movie? Does a crouching Tiger mean a Hidden Turd? Do even I care? Etc
They even have a new style of “reveal”, which means neither the celebrity nor the victim, *cough* dancer, are supposed to know who they’re getting. Mainly I remember Vincent went from a presentiment of terror to ecstatic relief, in case someone had tricked him and he really was left with Ann. Instead of course Anton got her. “I’ve always wanted him” she opined. So he’s not just the housewife’s choice then, she also the choice of the dotty old spinster who resides amongst cats and pigeon poo. As his party piece, Anton took her for a spin. Keep it clean, now, because Ann is for no suggestion of sex or any nonsense like that. Anton was hunched over her like a dancing bear. I thought that kind of spectacle was outlawed nowadays.
Another reveal I remember was that of Gavin Henson with Katja. He comes across as a hur-hur schoolboy without much in his metaphorical satchel, pleasant and innocent if a bit divvy. Interesting to contemplate he was married to Charlotte Church and she named him as the baddie. This after all her drunken notoriety and the likelihood that betrayal has too many syllables for him. Someone did try to tell me they weren’t even married, and added “I think with both its pot and kettle”. Oh, so that's how you make babies... I always had trouble getting jelly out the mould anyway. Apparently he’s scared of getting an erection. I think I’d be more scared of getting an erection and nobody noticing.
Apparently they’re going to return to a results show broadcast a day later than the live one. They do this to keep you suspended in a state of preternatural orgiastic excitement, a state of extreme and prolonged tension previously approached only by Ann Widdecombe's bra straps. I’ll let Pamela Stephenson do the analysis on that one. Yes, I have noticed that this “therapist” has got herself on the show. I can remember her zany antics on an 80s breakfast show, and rather than entrust lynxmale's sensitive psyche to this loose cannon born-again pseud, I'd sooner gouge out my own poo with a spoon. Of course, I have transference issues. Why don’t you check this stuff out:
“To be honest, being on Strictly is partly an experiment. As someone who has long been researching the psychological effects of fame, I am in a unique position to watch the effects on my own psyche as I am catapulted into the limelight. Among last week's progress notes were jottings such as: "Noticed hypomanic state during press launch – immediately afterwards, experienced moderate to severe ego-dystonia because I had felt compelled to present a more glamorous/wittier version of myself (true self deemed not good enough? – accompanying shame)"; and "After launch show experienced sleeplessness, tachycardia [a fast heart beat] and mild dissociative state (type: depersonalisation)."”
She did round this off with a little joke after. Oh, how I’d love to believe her. But she also has pseud competitions with her friends:
“My best friend (also a psychologist) blames our tendency to buy awful souvenirs on holiday in Spain on what she calls "situational aesthetic".”
Ah, so it’s almost humorous, eh? ;)
“But I am most fascinated by the anthropological aspects of dance – its history and development in various cultures. I briefly studied Balinese dance in Indonesia and, during a recent stay in the South Pacific, learned to dance the Samoan taualaga. My current passion is for the social forms of Latin dances popular in my New York neighbourhood – the butt-shaking, passionate ones such as the bachata, meringue, salsa, and the Argentinian tango.”
On this, you can take her at her word. She really is an overheated post-climacteric.
“panting sexagenarian actually manages to get something right, such as whirling on a centimeter into a genital-grinding clutch with a breast-bouncing backbend to follow.”
“I find myself imagining their steamy courtship over a sizzling rumba, leading to a sexual tsunami that defies even my vivid imagination.”
Jung was never like this! I'll put it this way:
There was an old duffer named Freud
his dirty mind made him one to avoid.
He’s been endorsed by a cougar
some post-climacteric old hoofer
and it all leaves me just vaguely annoyed
Another curiosity is a woman called Michelle from some American band called Destiny’s Child. That sounds like a good name for a band, if only she wasn’t in it. I’m not sure she’s going anywhere and she doesn’t rise high on the lynxmale leg-o-meter either. Hers look like something I was always told the cats shouldn’t get hold of from my chicken leftovers, or they could get peritonitis. Maybe I could use them to get the bits out from between my teeth. Yes this woman is skinny, a veritable gob-on-a-stick.
Mmm, I have been doodling for long enough in this session and I’ll have to find time to wrap up the first elimination cycle later. Don’t worry, there’s no scatological jokes here. I have to find a hole in my busy schedule, normally consisting of feeding crumbs & beer to Sid the Slug, and prancing around in front of the webcam in my home-made replica Ola Jordan outfits . Sid really likes the one with the tickler feathers at the back.
Others at the bottom of the greasy pole awaiting eviction were Peter, Paul and Ann. It looked like either Peter or Paul were going to fly, fly away. The bookies certainly thought so. Paul was 2/1 and 3/1, Peter at 5/2. Ann’s repartee and the cosy place in our psyche reserved the victorian freak show came to her rescue. Ann instructed Anton with a wagging finger against anything racy in her routine and she and Anton ended up on the orchestra stage with her asking what the last move was. Anton picked her up and whirled her around. I haven’t seen trotters whirling around in mid-air like that since Rocky had a go at the carcasses in the cold store. Ann is proof against “cheap shots” so far. Her highlight was catching up Anton with a foot kick in the Waltz. Our sly old ballroom specialist knew it would come out even better when wrong! The lynx wonders how long the joke can go on. Ann won't fake tan, she doesn't know a heel lead from a toe poke and she looks like the back end of a pantomime horse. She'll bring the gaff into disrepute. There's no place for frivolity in Strictly Come Dancing! Ann's insistence on keeping the dances at metaphorical and literal arms' length could mean the viewers will tire and she'll go long before she has the chance for second thoughts.
Peter danced apprehensively in his first Waltz. His Salsa was looser, but not loose enough. After all, he’s been throwing himself at the floor all his life. Did you expect him to curl over backwards like something out of the circus? We ended up with dodgy dad-dancing.
