The X Factor

Picture the scene.  It’s autumn 2005 and rather than spending a third year at university, I’ve been shipped off to Germany to fulfil the position of human dictionary at a grammar school under the auspices of a year abroad.  All my shiny brand-new friends are carrying on to their finals without me.  But, thanks to low-cost airlines, I’m able to come back.  After about nine hours of travelling, which includes a bus transfer to a Swiss airport, a 45-minute flight, further trains and nonsense, I reach my hallowed college and burst into a friend’s room expecting a hero’s welcome.  But everyone ignores me.  On the screen of the television holding all their attention, a swarthy muscular chap is cavorting in what looks like an LA swimming pool.  “Guys, it’s me!” I try, convinced they must not have twigged to the significance of my presence.  “Sssh,” they all go, “we wanna see Chico.”  I drop my bags despondently and sink into a seat, well aware that only an advert break will allow attention to revert back to me.

This was my first real exposure to watching The X Factor.  It was the Judges’ Houses section of the second series, famous for Chico’s yearning to be taken through to the Live Shows manifesting in an electrocution-risking impromptu swim with microphone in Sharon Osbourne’s back garden.  I was derisorily regarding my pals’ viewing choice, but the pressures of final examinations had led them to seek solace in the most mindless of TV.  We had been out and about too much to bother with the first series, its super broad appeal as a shiny-floor Saturday night schedule-filler to replace Pop Idol, Popstars and Popstars: The Rivals sparking only contempt as we had the time of our lives spending our student loans on non-academic pursuits.  But the cultural steamrolling of this reality TV show soon proved unavoidable.  Leaving the oldies to watch Strictly Come Dancing, by its fourth series, The X Factor had struck gold and become essential viewing.  The revolution began with the addition of the fourth judge, Dannii Minogue, only for her to be joined in her second year by the then Cheryl Cole in a race to the bottom of constantly younger and tauter-skinned female judges while Louis Walsh and Simon Cowell aged in peace, subject to none of the same scrutiny despite looking much much worse.

Either way, we reached peak X Factor, with two of the X Factor-iest X Factor moments that stick in my mind being the following:

1.      Cheryl Cole stepping down from the judges’ table to perform The Promise with her bandmates from Girls Aloud, all clad in massive sparkling dresses and ITV’s Sunday night schedule being definitively the epicentre of British culture at that moment in time.  Sigh.

2.      Katy Perry debuting her single Firework on the Sunday results show, daring to sing live despite missing all of her notes and leading to some hilarious comments from various friends in their Facebook statuses decrying lyrics that went “Boom boom boom, even bigger than the moon moon moon.”  Everything about this sentence is now vintage and dated.

Now, after decades of manufacturing music acts, The X Factor has taken on a big refresh of itself, finally acknowledging that there probably aren’t any decent singers left in the UK and that everyone is watching Love Island instead.  Nevertheless, let’s celebrate the stages in any popstar’s life as they make their way from hideous unknown to hideous C-lister.

Auditions

Descending on various cities, the crew take over large venues and erect awnings and queuing infrastructure as Dermot O’Leary shouts at a moving crane camera that Sheffield/Manchester/Newcastle/Sutton Coldfield has the X Factor while crowds of wannabes and their dragged-along families make a cross shape with their pudgy arms.  Series have toyed around with closed-room auditions and demanding applicants sing in front of baying audiences.  Either way, we’ll get a background story about each hopeful singer.  The fun part is guessing whether they are going to be outstanding or appalling.  I’ve covered my disdain for sob stories in a previous post on the much less popular The Voice UK, but I’ll repeat the fact that so many people just “want it so bad” as if that’s reason enough to deserve a successful recording career.  There are two types of delicious moment we are aiming for here.  One is watching someone deluded get a reality check regarding their superstar aspirations: they can’t actually sing in tune.  The other is the genuine excitement when a great new act is discovered.  Nobody mentions the fact that everyone has been pre-vetted by production before being trotted out in front of the judges, as we’re here for the entertainment factor, relying on Cowell to interrupt singers mid-flow to demand different songs in the rudest way possible – leading to one of the best Bo’ Selecta! apings known to the modern world: “No offence, but I wish your mother was dead.”  But in fact, the most offensive part is always Louis Walsh likening any performer of colour to literally any other black celebrity: “You remind me of a young Moira Stuart.”

Bootcamp

This is my favourite part but it’s always rushed through.  By this stage, you’ve forgotten everyone from the Auditions, let alone the ones you really liked.  Clusters of hopefuls are cut willy nilly, sent packing to a big waiting coach for the long trip back to the regions.  There’s always a silly sausage who gets trolleyed the night before and then stinks up the stage as a result.  Cruelly, acts are made to sing together in an unnecessary test of their ability to collaborate with other artists before they’ve even established themselves.  The culmination is the judge reveal to each of the categories.  In separate conference rooms, the Overs, the Boys, the Girls and the Groups wait anxiously, hoping more than anything that their chances aren’t killed by being assigned Louis Walsh.

Six Chair Challenge

This was injected in recent years to overhaul the tiredness of the format in its later decades.  A final bunch in each category is whittled down to six.  One by one, they sing before an incensed mob, receiving a chair/wonky stool if they’ve done well enough.  Gripped by their own emotion and attention-seeking, the judges give away too many chairs too early, resulting in cruel swapsies where the privilege of sitting is snatched from young hopefuls.  However, the cruellest part is the fact that they only supply one wobbly stool for the groups, leaving the majority of the band hovering awkwardly on foot behind a frontman.

Judges’ Houses

If you end up with a chair, then you get to go on holiday with your judge.  You don’t get to take the chair with you, though.  This is the best product placement opportunity for airlines on UK television, as we’re guaranteed overexcited scenes in airports where the acts in each category find out their destination.  The unlucky bastards under Louis Walsh are guaranteed a trip to drizzly Dublin, so you can always manage a smile at their disappointed faces.  Meanwhile, Cowell and the others hit up glamorous US and European cities, though the contestants with criminal records conveniently drop out when they are denied visas.  Everything that takes place from this point on is pure over-emotional slush, but first each judge reveals their celebrity help-judge.  Usually it’s some famous pal who has nothing more interesting to say than “I’m glad I’m not the one deciding,” which is beyond unhelpful, though at least you can rely on Sinitta to be making suggestions about how to use foliage as a clothing option.  Each act performs, normally in an awkward spot by a swimming pool, probably with the sun in their eyes.  The judges stay up late agonising, before the most drawn-out sequence known to broadcasting.  Each act is told face-to-face if they’re being taken through to Live Shows.  A masterclass on how to respond was given by Rylan in 2012, but we end up oscillating wildly between happiness and devastation.  It’s at this point that all my favourites are normally culled, but Dermot is always there to show he doesn’t really care either way.

Live Shows

And then here we go: the countdown to Christmas.  All the acts sing every Saturday, usually according to some sort of theme.  Big Band Week seems sadly to be long gone, but sometimes it’s Guilty Pleasures and occasionally it’s the back catalogue of whoever they can get to sing on the Sunday, however spurious.  I like to imagine the least appropriate acts for this sort of week: the greatest hits of System of a Down or Marilyn Manson for example.  If you thought Judges’ Houses were drawn out, these shows can sometimes take several years to get through.  Each judge intros their act, typically looking down the wrong camera.  Cue jeopardy-emphasising VT where expressions like “Barry’s gotta nail it this week, or he’s going home” abound, and we forget these people literally get to return to warm homes and gainful employment, rather than the religious persecution and unbridled violence we’re all too willing to send Syrian refugees to.  The acts perform in front of cameramen who can’t keep still for five seconds, so you see many shots of everything and nothing, before the judges give unfounded criticism based on how much they want to be cheered by the studio audience.  Dermot then opens the phone lines and you vote to save your favourite act.  I’ve never missed an election (though nobody I’ve ever voted for as ever got into power) but I wouldn’t be caught dead actually ringing up to vote on this show.  I prefer the sense of disappointment when my favourites are ejected.  Voting stats are released once the series are over and the outright winner has normally already stretched ahead by week one.

Live Shows – The Results

In historical times, people would find out who had got the fewest votes on the same night, like barbarians.  Now, to stretch things out, the results are in a separate Sunday show.  This was to complement perfectly the winning Sunday line-up of The X Factor Results and Downton Abbey, trapping millions of Brits on their sofas for two whole hours.  The show used to open with the never well-rehearsed group number, a highlight for fans of awkwardness.  Guest acts perform, and things get meta when a previous season’s winner comes back, free to deliver their single without the judges being allowed to slag them off this time.  Finally, Dermot reveals the bottom two and then the judges decide who to save.  There are tears and tantrums, but nothing beats Deadlock.  This is when the judges are split and we have to go back to the vote result.  The nation comes to a standstill and everyone has carte blanche to rape and pillage freely until a disappointed minstrel is being shown their best bits.  Through attrition, we are finally left with the, er, finalists.

The Final

Hello Wembley!  These days, the Final has outgrown a TV studio and a whole arena needs hiring out to get through the inordinate pageantry of selecting who’s got the X Factor.  Established acts clamour to promote latest releases in and among the finalists’ own best songs, with a quick comedic break offered by the exploitative but necessary wheeling out of all the worst singers from that year’s series.  No expense is spared, as long as that expense is spent on confetti cannons.  Tradition dictates the finalists duet with the planet’s most successful popstars.  One peak year saw Beyoncé grace our stage, but these days it tends to be the awful Robbie Williams, who is guaranteed to forget his own lyrics.  Our winner is crowned and rather than crossing live to Andi Peters at the CD factory, the winner’s single is available for immediate download.  Our champion tries to perform it before being rushed by the other finalists and Dermot eventually gives up trying to keep control of the activities on stage.  Even winning the show doesn’t guarantee success – more than half of the victors have faded into obscurity.  But, sure as eggs is eggs, another generation of schoolchildren will expect overnight success in pop music, should their careers as YouTubers or pro footballers not work out.]

I jest!  I’ve slagged this show off throughout, but I really do bloody love it.  Working in media buying, I dreamed ITV would one day invite me.  But then my team did a licensing deal for a client directly with the production company.  Next thing I knew, I found myself at Fountain Studios for a results show.  I was meant to be looking after clients, but I was so excited that they were forced to take on a parental role to my hyperactive teenage behaviour.  Taylor Swift performed Shake It Off and I forgot to breathe throughout the whole performance.  Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to be invited back, both to the Live Shows and The Final itself.  The best part of the Live Shows is mingling backstage with the friends and family of the contestants, lording it over them with my free-drink wristband while they’re forced to pay.  The acts then emerge from their performances and I’m always surprised by how tiny some of them are.  Throughout filming, Cowell spends every commercial break outside smoking (assuming the fag packets are stored in his vile bootcut jeans, while the lighter nestles among his toilet brush barnet), while the female judges have their hair and make-up constantly touched up.  The Final is a massive undertaking, with a VIP ball in a nearby hotel before and after.

This blog has made it clear on repeated occasions that a lot of my viewing tastes align with those of teenage girls, so my fandom of The X Factor should come as no surprise.  This year, it’s taking a break while other formats are trialled, and while it may never ascend to its giddy heights, it still remains one of the biggest shows on commercial television, despite its overly commercial, sensationalised and desperate-for-drama tendencies.  Let’s be honest, nobody delays their Saturday evening out any more to catch The X Factor, plus you can always catch up the next day with the benefit of fast forward.  But I’ll never stop being charmed by the great unwashed’s unbridled desire for five minutes of fame.  So, in tribute, let’s make me famous by telling a friend how good this blog is.

Toast Of London

Apropos of nothing, this week I shall be peeling back the skin of Toast Of London, taking a look at what lies beneath and maybe even sniffing it.  I say apropos of nothing, as I cannot link this week’s choice to anything happening in wider popular culture (plus the wankiness of the term suits the pretension of the programme in question).  Toast Of London’s three series came out between 2012 and 2015, yet my stumbling across them on Netflix in recent times and harnessing the gentle mirth and subversive lampooning of the luvvies that dominate British acting as my accompanying background viewing to Sunday evenings’ food prep marathon (step one: peel sweet potatoes, step two: accept the weekend is over) is particular only to me.  Yet that has never stopped me doing anything on this blog – in fact, regular readers will know it revolves more around me than it does around actually providing useful boxset recommendations.  That said, I have been craving more of Matt Berry since I made my way through The IT Crowd.  My need for his incredible voice was partly fulfilled by old episodes of The Adam Buxton Podcast (that’s right, I also voraciously consume content in podcast form – the eagle-eared among you may even have noticed a quotation from Russell Brand’s Under The Skin in this very introduction), but a vehicle of his own would surely hit the spot.

Fans of silliness will be well rewarded, though the brand of silliness is more conceptual than you might find in my other favourite silly sitcom, Miranda.  Toast is a London-based actor who isn’t that successful.  He gets enough degrading voiceover work to keep going, he has potentially been a household name during a previous decade’s heyday, but he still needs to badger his agent for work while she too badgers him to take up unsuitable jobs.  Like Andy Millman in Extras, he exhibits seething jealousy for any member of his acting cohort who is doing better than him.  The best thing about all of these minor actors is their surnames.  Toast in itself is enough to stop any top billing sounding too serious, conjuring up images of melting butter spread with crumb-covered knives.  Surpassing that English word for banal naffness is the name of Toast’s greatest rival, Ray “Bloody” Purchase.  Purchase is such a wet sock of a word and of a name.  Neither glamorous, nor familiar, it’s a simple monetary transaction for a good or service.  Starring Ray Purchase and Steven Toast isn’t what you want to hear about any blockbuster film.  Nor will you.  Purchase turns up on almost every job of Toast’s, outdoing him through chumminess with difficult prima donna directors or getting on better with smirkingly smug mugs of voiceover booth technicians.

Both take their craft seriously, but the comedy comes from showing how amateur and ham they really are.  Even Toast’s natural flair as a high winds actor (shouting in front of large fans) doesn’t bode well for future jobs, as whatever can go wrong does.  Helping to expose the evil of taking acting too seriously is a supporting cast with names as delicious as Toast’s and Purchase’s.  There’s Ken Suggestion, Duncan Clench, Cliff Bonanza, Jenny Spasm and Max Gland, not to mention a further raft of names who are only ever referred to such as Warren Organ and Sookie Houseboat.  Each belongs beneath a signed black-and-white headshot in a regional curry house.  Most beloved for me, though, is Toast’s agent, Jane Plough (pronounced Pluff).  Played by Doon Mackichan (whom I’ve always loved since Smack The Pony and I once smiled at on a train), Plough makes grandiose statements about never opening the attachments on emails (amen) and is often seen calling her client from completely unexplained sexual scenarios involving scantily clad young men and some dessert options.

Self-importance is easily made ridiculous, but we all end up on Team Toast, rooting for him to catch a break, despite him being a misogynist pig who only cares about himself.  He is aghast at current trends and longs for his younger years galivanting around Soho when he was a youthful upstart, rather than having to cope with the sniggers his voiceover recordings invariably draw.  Sending up how the British revere their stage and screen actors might seem like easy prey, but Toast Of London’s silliness has a caustic edge, an absurd narrative and a surrealist approach to almost every scene.  You’ll feel delicious every time you hear that immortal line: “Hello Steven, it’s Clem Fandango here.  Can you hear me?”  And so, apropos of nothing, let’s have another series please.

The Apprentice

For the landmark 117^th post of Just One More Episode, I’ll be returning not only to the recently talked-about topic of programmes I don’t watch (like Naked Attraction) but also to the rarely covered theme of programmes I actively hate (Altered Carbon).  While this blog has mostly remained a safe space of positivity about all the different boxsets out there (with a healthy dose of my own self-obsession), this week we are turning our smarmy observations and cutting critiques to the absolute pile of dross that is The Apprentice.  A fifteenth series has slipped onto air this month to a collective shrug of indifference and I’m happy to say I feel no need whatsoever to catch a single episode.  Part of this is now down to the fact I’ve reached the stage of flat ownership where I can have friends round for dinner (especially ones that invite themselves), so I’m too busy serving up Viennetta as a feasible dessert option to tune into this BBC flagship production.  So, eighties ice cream products aside, let’s go through the reasons why The Apprentice should be stricken from the TV guide.  And just to recap quickly the premise for anyone who’s never grasped it, this show is, in short, competitive job interviewing.  Yes, really.

It’s reality TV but pretends not to be

During the first few series from 2005 onwards, this programme’s biggest crime (against my personal view of what’s wrong and what’s right) was to provide a route to reality TV for viewing snobs that claimed not to be able to tolerate the genre.  “Big Brother!” they would cry, “I can’t be watching that bunch of wannabes desperate to be famous.  But have you seen The Apprentice?”  I would sneer at them, pointing out they should just own the pleasure they take in consuming trash TV.  If you never miss an episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians or Love Island then you might as well own that behaviour.  Anyone who judges you for it isn’t important.  Yet The Apprentice legitimised our natural interest in watching ordinary people humiliate themselves by dressing itself up in the pinstripes of actual business.  A tenuous link to product development, sales, marketing and boardroom practices suddenly meant that it was highbrow to watch 20-year-olds from Essex slag each other off while desperately trying to stay on the telly as long as possible.  Frankly, unforgiveable dishonesty.

The stupid tasks

Each week’s episode is themed around an industry, whether confectionary, fashion, events or some combination of all three to make cold hard cash.  A common trope of reality TV is to get people to showcase a skill but with the added pressure of an unfeasibly short period of time in which to do so (Great British Bake Off’s timed technical challenges, or the matter of days allowed to master a Quickstep in Strictly Come Dancing).  But somehow, The Apprentice stretches this too far by making ill-matched groups of applicants think up, refine, manufacture, distribute, market and sell a product within mere moments.  If this wasn’t enough of a recipe for failure, you need to factor in that the all team members are working against each other, with their interests vested in making everyone but themselves look as incompetent as possible.  What ensues are montages of the contestants, dressed in their best banker-wear, running around London streets doing everything wrong before a classic bollocking in the boardroom.

Stupid Lord Sugar

Enter (from a tiny door in the middle of the room, presumably coming from some sort of subterranean troll hole) Lord Sugar, the man whose apprentice these people are supposed to want to be.  Apparently he’s done well in big business, but he doesn’t strike me as someone dynamic enough to thrive in 2019’s brutal economy.  His furrowed brow thinly muffles the sounds of his mind whirring as he dodderily computes what’s said to him.  Fair enough, what’s being said is normally an accusatory argument between a handful of competitive business wannabes, but it all seems a bit much.  Relishing his own interruptions, our Alan then wheels out dad-gags that I swear have been written and fed to him by a team of eighties comedians.  Or sugar-jacked ten-year-olds.  If he announced “Well you’re a stupid poo poo head” to someone I don’t imagine a single eyebrow would rise in in surprise.  But that’s the thing about interviewing: best practice is to put the candidate at ease.  Instead, Sugar rules by fear and intimidation, pointing rudely and mistakenly firing people before he’s even employed them.  The apprentices might be inane, but I would feel more comfortable watching them judge him for his contributions to humanity.

The stupid contestants

This is a bit harsh as my only point of reference here has been the odd one that’s ended up on Celebrity Big Brother.  James Hill was actually a top lad, and I was even won over by Katie Hopkins in the house, watching her reason carefully with Katie Price in a way that betrayed a side to her which today’s unacceptable media persona has shat all over.  The rest come across as officewear-clad interns that talk a big game about their skills but end up set up for failure by each week’s task.  One thing I’ve learned in my working life is that nobody ever looks good blaming someone else, and yet these people sit in front of Sugar pointing fingers at poor old Jenny for not selling enough soap.  Maybe squabbling children is what’s missing from the world of professional behaviour, but it has me reaching for the remote.

Its crimes against humanity

Our UK version is based on an original US iteration that first gave a platform to Donald Trump.  This says it all.

Phone abuse

We’ll look back at The Apprentice UK’s most significant contribution to culture: holding the iPhone below your chin while talking on speaker.  This action became characteristic during the contestants’ various wild goose chases, coordinating errand teams sabotaging the overall effort on the sly.  Now it’s taken hold on the top deck of many of London’s buses, which is great if you want to be involved in other people’s banal chitter chatter.  Similarly, the tension of each episode’s climactic boardroom scene is supposedly elevated by a receptionist using the world’s oldest landline to tell the nervously waiting applicants as and when Sugar is summoning them to his shiny boardroom for some more showing off.  This all needs to stop.

In summary then, for those that might have missed the nuance, I really do take exception to this show.  It’s trash masquerading as premium, a theme that runs through the whole operation, from the contestants to Captain Sugar himself.  I don’t mind lots of showing off, but once someone’s screamed “look at me!” long enough to get your attention, they should have something interesting to tell you.  This is never the case in The Apprentice.  I don’t watch it, and I don’t like it.  Of course, loyal readers, you’re free to make your own decisions, just like Sugar is free of UK employment law in order to make his own hires.  But just be honest with yourself: you’re watching it because you like trash.

Strictly Come Dancing

Dah da-dah dah dah dah daaaah, dah da-dah dah dah.  That music can only mean one thing: summer is well and truly over and we are now counting down the weeks till Christmas.  How do we know this?  By the return of Strictly Come Dancing season, of course.  Regular readers might think this primetime piece of the BBC1 Saturday and Sunday night schedule is a bit broad for the acerbic sideswipes of Just One More Episode.  But you can’t beat a bit of wholesome teatime family entertainment.  There’s enough terrible awful out there in the world that sometimes distracting yourself with concern about the quality of a faded soapstar’s Paso Doble can be just what the doctor ordered.

I was snootily dismissive of the show when it first appeared in 2004.  It seemed like a Daily Mail-esque attempt to bring back a long-gone former era by rebooting pensioners’ favourite Come Dancing, though the update came from the slapping on of the slightly lost adjective Strictly (presumably in an attempt to bring to mind the sexy intensity of Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom).  Either way, the name doesn’t make any grammatical sense.  You can’t tell someone to carry out an action in a strict way: strictly wash your hands, strictly put your trousers back on etc.  But this is just the first quality of many that makes the show so magical: it is fully departed from reality.

The concept is simple: a handful of celebrities learn to ballroom dance by being partnered up with world champion professionals.  Each week, they present a dance before a panel of judges, whose scores are combined with a public vote to determine weekly eliminations until an overall winner is left to lift the Glitterball Trophy.  Whereas most celeb shows have come with a sense of shame and desperation (from Celebrity Big Brother to the early days of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here), Strictly Come Dancing has always kept an aspirational quality simply because it looks so much fun and wins the heart of every participant.

And did someone say Sir Bruce Forsyth?  Probably not, but his presenting role for the show’s first ten years became part of its essential charm – you couldn’t help but enjoy his rambling links while at the same time slightly wishing they were over.  Sadly, Brucey’s last Tango was in 2017 (RIP), but the addition of Claudia Winkleman since 2014 has multiplied the joy the show brings, proving true the revolutionary theory that two women (she and Tess Daly) can present a primetime show without any need of an older gentleman.  Winkleman’s wizardry originates in her fringe, which she peers through while frequently rendering speechless the dancers around her with her quick(step) wit.  I love her.

But let’s be honest: everyone involved in this show must be wonderful.  Its production ambition is now so huge that I can only guess at the size of the various teams: wardrobe, hair, make-up, props, not to mention the band and singers who will literally take on anything, week in, week out.  I have particular affection for the judges.  Sadly, dear Len Goodman (seven!) is no longer pickling his walnuts having retired in 2016, but Shirley Ballas has proved a replacement to be reckoned with as Head Judge.  I always enjoyed Darcey Bussell, but am thrilled to see Motsi Mabuse storming onto the scene.  An older woman of colour in a role of authority on primetime TV shouldn’t need a comment in 2019, but it feels fitting to celebrate her appointment.  Meanwhile, whatever the significance to diversity, you’ve still got Bruno Tonioli’s elastic turns of expression being delivered with such energy he regularly slips off his chair, alongside Craig Revel Horwood’s deeply unimpressed face.  As each lifts their scoring paddle at the end of a dance, you realise numbers have never been so exciting.  Or glittery.

I often sit there wondering how I can possibly get on the show.  Normally, through work contacts, I can get tickets to my favourite telly, having bothered The X Factor live shows many a time over the years.  But as a BBC production, the doors are shuttered to my advertising dollars.  My only hope (and current career plan) therefore is to get a minor part in a soap opera.  My acting is hammy enough and I am open minded about onscreen nudity in case there are any late-night specials.  I’m not fussy about the story arc: a murder, or some other terrible crime perhaps.  It just needs to be enough to get me at the top of that staircase one Saturday evening, dressed in skin-tight trews, Cuban heels and a garish shirt barely buttoned to the naval, announced by Alan Dedicoat with some sort of creative play on my occupation (failed blogger and serial boxset consumer?), with an East European professional lady clasped at my side.  I reckon I could at least make it to Blackpool.

And that’s the glorious thing: how Strictly punctuates the road to the end of the year: movie week, Halloween, the first Argentine Tango, Blackpool, the final and into the Christmas special.  And the years have been punctuated by the professional dancers’ welcome place in the lists of what we call household names (went a bit Miranda there, didn’t I?).  You can hear the housewives frothing over their beloved Kevin Clifton, while Anton du Beke (the only one to make all 17 series) has mastered the withering comment after years of being saddled with an array of no hopers.  Janette Manrara is always the one to watch in the spectacular group performances while Karen Hauer and Aljaž Skorjanec compete for the world’s biggest smile.  They are all great and it’s easy to see how deeply they care about getting through to each next week.

The final element I’ll go on about is the celebrities themselves.  At some point in the future, everyone who’s ever been well known in the UK will have taken part, leading to my parents’ favourite question to ask about anyone famous: “What were they in last?”  The quality has been mixed, from the most appalling performances that make you wonder if that person can even clap in time to a beat, let alone perform a Foxtrot.  Then, there are the average ones, and both this and the former category can be fast-forwarded if you’re watching on catch up.  Sure, every minute of the show can be enjoyed, but once you compare the top scorers, there really is no competition.  So here is a rundown of a handful of the best dances ever (that I can currently remember):

Jay McGuiness and Aliona Vilani’s Jive, 2015

It was week three (movie week) and the pair’s Pulp Fiction-themed performance began softly but took us all by surprise as it escalated and escalated to breath-taking heights of cool fleet-footedness.  The audience’s cheers made it clear that they couldn’t believe it.  Nobody was expecting this from a chap off The Wanted and it became an absolute best in class.  The nods to the film were as perfect as the execution.

Danny Mac and Oti Mabuse’s Samba, 2016

Never an easy dance for the celebrity males, Mac embraced every element of the discipline, looking as comfortable in hold with Mabuse as he did shaking his hips liberally while out of it on the floor.

Alesha Dixon and Matthew Cutler’s Cha Cha Cha, 2007

Any of Dixon’s dances could be in here, but this one really played to her strengths.  Full of attack (a Darcey-ism) yet playful in nature, this dance elevated 2007 as a watershed year in the show when the celebrities really had to be exceptionally good to triumph, not just a bit good.

Caroline Flack and Pasha Kovalev’s Charleston, 2014

She of Love Island was a worthy Strictly winner, totally nailing this comedic routine with perfect form and smiling throughout while Pasha tossed her hither and thither.

Alexandra Burke and Gorka Márquez’s Jive, 2017

Elevating things again with perfect flicks throughout, Burke jives the bejesus out of Proud Mary and the crowd goes wild.

Aston Merrygold and Janette Manrara’s Cha Cha Cha, 2017         

Merrygold’s early exit from this series was one of history’s greatest miscarriages of justice and I still don’t know how it was allowed to happen.  In this dance, he still looks cool, despite being dressed as a blue troll, and proves beyond doubt why he and Janette should have gone on to the final.  Guaranteed smiles.

There are too many to mention, but let’s just take a moment to think about Lisa Riley’s Samba at Blackpool ending in the splits.  Yes.  I’m surprised more couples don’t forget their steps, though upsets can and do occur.  Perhaps the most distressing moment for anyone taking part is the Rumba, which surely needs to be cast out after so many years of stiff-hipped sportsmen making a mockery of it.  Nevertheless, Strictly remains some of the best fun you can have on TV.  And the ratings!  While X Factor fades from its peak, its BBC rival still easily draws ten million viewers.  No sob stories, no nastiness for the sake of it: just the pursuit of an artform that is potentially one of humankind’s greatest contributions to itself.  Maybe if life contained more dancing, there would be less Brexit.  The scores are in: TEN!