Among my life’s achievements I treasure a rare and special honour. I have the lowest ever recorded score on Strictly Come Dancing. That quartet of steely-hearted judges awarded me a lamentable eight out of a possible 40 points for a Cha Cha routine that was hypnotically and hysterically hopeless. A record, I’m quietly proud to admit, that stands unbroken to this day. I danced with the poise of a prematurely opened deck-chair and made John Sergeant look like Tinkerbell. The evil Craig gave me a single miserable point and Bruno described my routine with the World Ballroom Champion Hazel Newberry (poor woman) as like watching a ‘Reliant Robin making love to a Ferrari’. Even dear old Len found it hard to hide his frowns. I was booted off in the first round.
This was back in Series Two when Strictly was a very different show. Those early programmes had a wholesome amateurism that gave the sequins, American Tan tights and Bruce’s toe-curling jokes a context of charming irony. No high seriousness, no hand-wringing about declining dancing standards and no gossip about which A-list celebrity is slated to be signing up next. It was that rare thing, a simple reality format that required genuine determination, hard work and skill. Self-deprecating contestants took their dancing regimes seriously, but never themselves. There was a cleverly chosen mix of well-known (but not hugely famous) pundits and performers who were there because they all believed in Strictly’s first rule: it’s better to have danced and lost than never to have danced at all. The currency was fun, not fame.
But these days the programme attracts the sort of media coverage normally reserved for the invasion of a small country. Ministers and MPs discuss it in reverential tones in the Commons and it has assumed the status of a Grade 1 national treasure. Recently the show has been all over the tabloids (again) with a daft ageism row over the sacking of Arlene Phillips, draconian cuts to the budget, an impending creative makeover and the outrageousness of Sharon Osbourne’s latest fee requests. An edgy rivalry now stalks the dance floor. There’s too much competition, too much vaulting ambition, too much self-obsession. Predictable really. Because like all big-rating TV formats a creeping and inevitable metamorphosis has corroded that original simplicity. Strictly is slowly being strangled by its sheer success.
Jay Hunt, the Controller of BBC1, now faces the daunting task of seamlessly reinventing what is one of the world’s most successful light entertainment shows. And that’s going to be as easy as picking up spilt mercury with a fork. But as a past Strictly contestant (albeit a poor one) and the creator of TV formats of my own, I think she’s off to a decent start. She’s absolutely right to cut budgets and not pay monster money for celebs. Every agent in the country is busting to get their clients on the show just for the massive exposure it brings. I’ve been with Strictly’s celebrity bookers and they’re constantly besieged by disorderly queues of soap stars and actors who are desperate to appear. Pay everyone the same flat fee, choose sympathetic and grounded contestants and don’t turn it into an OK! in taffeta. And she was right to remove Arlene. As a judge, she certainly knows her stuff, but Arlene made a critical error over the John Sergeant business. She famously insisted that Strictly was purely a dancing show and didn’t understand why John should be allowed to stay in week after week. Arlene didn’t get the whole point of the format. In the end she turned quite shirty.
As any watcher on the sofa full of crumbs will tell you Strictly isn’t, emphatically isn’t, just a dancing show. It’s a fabulously camp and baroque light entertainment hybrid. Which is why the audience reacted by voting mischievously to keep Sergeant in. That sympathy vote went nuclear — celebrating John’s dire dance moves became a national sport and the format was very nearly torpedoed. The public preferred his comedic clumsiness to any silly theology about serious dancing and the poor bloke, caught in the crossfire, had to resign. And the Sergeant incident sums up one of the show’s most compelling and precious core values. Mediocrity is funny and humour (as T.S. Eliot once said) is the antidote to everything. This is a uniquely flamboyant TV gem that shouldn’t be homogenised like X Factor but needs to stay as authentically charming and clunky as possible. Arlene was wrong. Strictly actually needs more crap dancers, not fewer.
The cricketer Darren Gough said to me that the only reason he agreed to do the show was that ‘I couldn’t possibly be any worse than you’. He went on to surprise everybody by winning Series Three with enormous aplomb and modesty. The transformation was magical and a glorious example of television alchemy at its very finest. But that rich and strange process of turning base metal into gold doesn’t work if you’ve got a line-up of grimly ambitious telly professionals with perfect teeth that have all done time at dance school. The audience may demand familiar faces, but they prefer them free from artifice, ego and showbiz guile. The journey from awful to amazing is what really matters and Strictly is the only reality show in the world that makes a virtue of celebrating effort rather than fame.
I make no apologies for sounding so anxiously protective. I may be Britain’s worst dancer but I genuinely did my best and that Cha Cha in front of 12 million people was one of the most terrifying moments of my life (my hands dripped like taps). But for months afterwards builders waved, van drivers whistled and pretty girls smiled. Never have I received so much warm approval for being so deeply rubbish. Failure, I discovered, is what civilises us and makes us interesting. And that’s what’s missing from Strictly at the moment. Watching real people dance their way from really bad to really good is the most compelling telly of all.
Quentin Willson is a motoring journalist and TV car expert.