While eating tea last night I flicked onto Strictly Come Dancing. I hadn’t really seen any of it before, and I was actually quite impressed. I’m not normally into reality tv shows due to the whole voting aspect, which I’ll come back to in a minute, but this was nevertheless quite entertaining. The premise is that x number of celebrities are trained in ballroom dancing, with a professional partner, and each week have to perform two routines. None of them had any experience in the field, so were learning from scratch. I like this idea. Having to actually do something difficult that requires many hours of work each week is a cut above most reality tv programmes, I think. It’s based on more than just personality / fame.

Except apparently it’s not.

The three remaining contestants last night were Natasha Kaplinsky (newsreader), Lesley Garrett (classical singer) and Christopher Parker (Eastenders actor). Now, unsurprisingly, I know nothing about dancing other than that it looks bloody difficult. Watching the routines, I had my impressions on who was doing well and who wasn’t and in general these agreed with the show’s judges, though more by luck than judgement I think. These four judges award a score out of ten for each couple. The points are added up and are used 50/50 with the public phone vote in order to decide who is knocked out of the competition each week.

Natasha’s routines looked pretty flawless to me, and the judges agreed. She was leader on the final scoreboard. Lesley also did very well, and was only a few points behind. Christopher, however, looked pretty bad even to me, and got very low scores from everyone. You could tell he was trying hard, but it didn’t look great and he had to rely on his partner to do anything complicated. His score was very low, something like half of Natasha’s. The comments from the judges indicated that this week he was in fact a touch better than he had been previously, but was still pretty awful. You can probably guess where this is going.

When the final votes were tallied Natasha and Christopher went through to the final while Lesley was knocked out. Given that the judges/public scores were 50/50, Christopher must have received a huge number of votes. That’s pretty pants, really. I reckon that all the adults watching voted for Natasha, while all the kids voted for Christopher by virtue of his being on Eastenders and having a baby-face. Lesley had nobody left. I know that the idea of the show is that it’s controlled by the viewers, but when they so obviously aren’t impartial it’s a bit pointless, really. You might as well just have a Big Brother style ‘who do you like the most’ show and be done with it. Screw the public, that’s what I say Hopefully Natasha will win next week.

Oh good grief, I just wrote an entire post about a reality tv show…What’s happening to me?!