Strictly Come Dancing

I must say it drives me round the bend all the applauding while the music act is on whether they be blind or not. It seems to me to be totally disrespectful to that act who are usually far more famous than those dancing. I would prefer it if no dancers at all came on as it detracts from the song when you have all those screams and cheers just for a particular move. If dancers are to dance then applause at the end please.

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago. It's my one pet hate about the show and really annoys me.

Danny chosen not to appear on ITT...

Poor Amy on the sofa on her own getting quite emotional.

I concur! If there are to be dancers, the audience should be respectful and leave all their applause to the very end of the song. I always feel bad for the music performer as their performance is almost all but drowned out by the crowd cheering the dancers that it totally detracts from their performance. It must make them feel a little underappreciated as they aren't getting the audience's full attention and the audience is cheering for the dancers and not for them.

In the words of those great philosophers Mary McCarty and Chita Rivera, whatever happened to class?

Poor Amy.

I've been thinking, surely the whole point of appearing on a reality show as big as Strictly is exposure, leading to the potential of new work opportunities, so surely Danny choosing not to turn up is detrimental to all of the hours of training put in and in effect, he's shooting himself in the foot.

All I know is, if she chooses to renew her contract then Amy will be back next year. However Danny won't.

I agree with @cleoskryker on this. I don’t think Danny can do right for doing wrong at this point. Look at the difference between how he is being demonised after what essentially amount to rumours, and Sean(n) Walsh who was caught on camera kissing a married woman, but survived the public vote (in spite of being a truly dreadful dancer.)

Charles is in the bottom two every week too which just seemed odd to me (I naively posted asking what he was famous for and why weren’t people voting for him, I see it now) and I think it’s related.

This is the first season I have watched, so maybe there’s a track record of black men doing really well on the show, but I can see some deep seated racism in the Danny situation.

Ore won but there's a lot of black celebs who have gone out early often surprisingly based on their dance ability, if they are good dancers and can stay high enough up on the leaderboard to build up a fanbase then they can go far but it does look like they might be more vulnerable early on.

However the week Seann survived the bottom two after the scandal hit he was much higher up the leaderboard so even if he ended up bottom of the vote it was perfectly possible for him to avoid the bottom two because of the combination of the judges scores. The next week he was near the bottom and went straight out. Danny was bottom with the judges this week so even if he wasn't bottom of the public vote had a good chance of being in the bottom two whatever.

It’s interesting that it’s a combination of judges scores and public vote. I like detail so immediately I’m interested to know exactly how that works. Imagine that’s a closely-guarded secret though.

Am not saying that it’s impossible for a black guy to win. But I do think that structural racism will make it consistently harder for black contestants on the show. Wasn’t there a Popbitch ‘investigation’ into when Alexandra Burke was on? I’ll google to see if I am remembering that properly and share a link if I can find it.

It's actually pretty simple. The judges scores are ranked so if there are 10 contestants the top scorer gets 10 and so on down until the bottom scorer gets 1. The same happens with the public vote, the one with the most votes gets 10 and the lowest gets 1. Where it gets complicated is when there is a tie on the judges leaderboard so if two people get 39 are at the top the both get 10 points and then the next person gets 9 points (it used to be 8 points but they discovered that when you're down to 3 or 4 couples that can potentially mean the bottom with the judges would not be able to be saved. They then combine the scores to give each couple a total score.

So this week the scores, with 9 couples, went 9 (Ashley), 8(Faye), 7(Charles), 6(Lauren), 5(Stacey), 5(Joe), 4(Graeme), 3 (Kate), 2 (Danny)

Since it is unlikely the public vote had ties then they would have probably gone 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1

Even if Danny was 5th in the public vote 2+5=7 he could have still been in the dance off as long as Kate, Joe, Stacey & Lauren all did ok and Charles wasn't bottom. Now given Charles has been in the dance off multiple times this year there is a good chance he was bottom but even then Danny could have been sixth in the public vote and still gone into the Dance off.  

I think the actual telephone voting (of all shows) cannot be fixed as it is independently regulated.

However, the vote can by hugely manipulated by the TV producers by editing, running order, costumes, choice of music etc etc. For example I was not surprised to see Graham in the dance off this week with those dreadful costumes - he was well and truly "stitched" up. I am amazed there are not more tantrums backstage (or perhaps there are) that we never hear about such as "I am NOT wearing THAT on national television!!" Some of the costumes this year are particularly hideous!

Ore is very different to DJJ - public school educated etc. He could be seen as “one of us”. However I think the point the Telegraph is making is that people are very quick to believe that DJJ is a bully even though they have no tangible evidence of this.