STRICTLY NOT DANCING

I am sorry to rain on the parade and frankly I suggest the more fanatical of you start erecting the heretics’ pyre preparatory to hurling me onto it, but please, somebody tell me, exactly what Strictly Come Dancing is actually for or about, except yet another opportunity to allow the Meejuhmachine to mess even more with our already completely addled minds?
As if the Soaps with their endless, mindless, breathless and over-wrought trivialities about the lives of drab nonentities at the bottom of the social food-chain were not enough brain damage.

Strictly Come Dancing is neither strict, nor comely nor strictly dancing. It is a bunch of c-list lumpen-TV totty shoe-horned into dresses which frankly would disgrace a Nevada knocking shop, hulking stiff legged sportsmen and the oddest assortment of sundry other “faces” most of whom would get passed over instantly in any sort of breeding or natural selection programme without a backward glance.

These incredibly inappropriately chosen oddities from the ruling cultural triumvirate of Television, Sport and Journalism, gallump inelegantly and for the most part unmusically around in front of four “ Judges” all of whom look to a person to be suffering from a lethal combination of terminal embarrassment and personal plumbing issues.
Allow the entire sorry mess to be presided, or should that be, lorded over by Bruce Forsyth who has raised the art of banality and mugging in the Wunnerful Whirl of Showbizzyness to an act of such pornographically buttock-clenching embarrassment, frozen in time somewhere between the death of Variety and Sammy Davis Jrs final hair weave, and lo! we have a televisual phenomenon!

Throw in some Sports Dance partners, yes I said it, Sports Dance, which is the bastard offspring of Hairdressing and the final thrashings of rabies, without the soul, the focus or the duende (look it up if you like) and you have a nightmare world caught somewhere between Saturday Night Fever and a bad hand-job in the toilets at Madam Jojos. All to an accompaniment of a mediahype of white noise pitch and astonishing ubiquity.

SCD - it even sounds like a terrifying public health menace - is the perfect opiate solution for the masses – actually the very one George Orwell promised would end-up being delivered to the drooling classes the moment the Advertising Industry (aka Big Brother's mouthpiece) cottoned onto TV as an unique opportunity for mass mind control.

The contestants are not dancers, their professional dance partners are twinkly toed hair-dos who specialise in the mind numbingly banal world of competitive ballroom dancing –they are NOT dancers either. They are exercise fanatics in sequins and make-up and that's just the men.
The whole farrago has as much to do with the rest of the vast, creatively complex and challenging world of “real” dancing and dance making as Margaret Thatcher has to do with Thug Kultcha.

The judges have to a person, never actually featured as dancers of any merit whatsoever themselves - honestly, try and find their dance CV's - not their Step-Maker CV's a WHOLE different thing to choreography or dancing for that matter – have somehow been empowered like some fantastical Star Chamber, to hurl at these hapless non-dancers a hair curlingly vitriolic mix of patronising professional jealousy, spite and breathlessly delivered poorly scripted judgemental criticism week after week.

The fact is when it started, it was just a chance for some hapless slebs with too much time on their hands (aka rapidly fading careers and aggressive agents) to dress up as the amateur denizens of Cat Houses or 50’s gigolos to fill a cheap Saturday night telly slot for some Car-crash TV Fun commissioning wonks.

It is interesting that when the redoubtable Mr Sergeant, the first of the grown-ups on this odd merry-go-round finally and very politely asked to get down from the mad-hatters tea-party on the grounds that the joke had worn too thin, the first people to saddle up and ride out with the media-lynch mob, were those judges who clearly had failed to understand that the first defence of the terminally untalented, who have been shot through the ceiling of their relative competencies, is to take themselves waaaay too seriously.

There is perhaps an ironic symmetry in this, in as much as it requires no more than the truly incompetent to judge the merely incompetent for the edification of the uninitiated.

All of this is preamble to the key point that Strictly Not Dancing has been and continues to be held up as the summit of achievement in the current “dance world”.

We now have a situation in which seriously weak, under-rehearsed and amateurishly underpowered performances of appalling bland and banal “choreography” is being passed off week after week as dancing that anyone should take seriously.

As far as hoping that this will encourage the next generation of genuinely interesting, committed and aesthetically challenging dance artists to buckle down and aspire to any idea of excellence, it is tantamount to the world’s great Renaissance artists trying to guide the next generation of painters by showing them the daubs of children and letting them throw paint around rather than the brilliant inspirational glories of the great ecclesiastical frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

If we balanced any of this arrant pap with the occasional flash of the vast store of available and truly inspiring examples of genuine choreographic design going on throughout the dance world, by getting it anywhere near our television screens, ever, it would not be so bad.

The problem is that Strictly Come Dancing, we are ALL now reliably informed ever more hysterically, is as good as it gets. In the absence of any competition, this may very well become true simply through repetition.

It was once opined by a wit far greater than mine that if you have been doing “it” whatever “it” may be for two years got away with it, you can call yourself a professional. The time frame seems to have drastically shortened.

A society gets both the government and the culture it deserves, particularly when both are clearly ever more willing to sell their souls for good ratings.