Petering out

Week 10: Top 7 Results - 29 November 2015

Last night! Blackpool hangover week continued its tradition of being a little bit anticlimactic, apart from Helen and Aljaž and Jay and Aliona who pulled off their best results so far this series. Len got stroppy, Tess got horny and Peter and Janette tumbled their way down to the very bottom of the leaderboard - or rather, stayed there from last week.

We open with a laundry themed pro dance to 'W-O-M-A-N', focusing on the female pros plus a bonus dancer whose name I don’t know (but is basically playing the part of Ola) [she's Charlotte Gooch, apparently - Steve]. I’m not really sure what genre this is meant to be, so let’s just say... show dance?  The storyline is that the women are all cute pastel dungarees-wearing, high-kicking sex pots, flirting with the poor innocent male pros (Tristan, Giovanni, Aljaž and Kevin) who are wearing pastel shirts and white T-shirts over their jeans and just wants to be left in peace to read their newspapers, but three of them eventually see the error of their ways, go away and gain blue denim jackets and then become magically sexy enough for the women, whilst Kevin loses his trousers and runs around in his pants. Such storytelling.

Actually, the most interesting part of the story is where both Tess and Claudia emerge from the washing machines, which suggests that they have been voyeuristically snooping on the whole thing like two peeping Toms. Claudia emerges with pants on her head, naturally. Daly dresswatch: black, sequiny and slightly uncomfortable -looking. What Winkleman’s wearing: a similar -shaped black dress to last night, with a weird beige vest-style neck that gives the overall impression of her wearing a vest under a dress, even though I’m pretty sure it’s all one garment. It was obviously a case of putting dry clean only garments in the washing machine or something, so we will give them the benefit of the doubt tonight.

Time for a recap of last night, hosted by Darcey for some reason. Was this one also earmarked for Ola? We must know! Quick, someone call Ofcom and force them to do an investigation! Len says, before the show, ‘it’s going to be a bumpy ride’, so he was obviously anticipating getting his snark on even before anyone danced. Also of note: Kellie and Kevin, Helen and Aljaž and Jay and Aliona all get a positive recap; Peter and Janette a negative one, Anita and Gleb mixed but mainly negative, Katie and Anton mixed but mainly positive, Georgia and Giovanni an even mix of positive and negative. We also see Len calling Georgia and Giovanni ‘Georgia and Giovanna’, which I forgot to mention in my previous recap, so consider it noted now.

Time for our first set of safety announcements. Safe are: Georgia and Giovanni (and she promptly bursts into tears); Helen and Aljaž. The first couple in the dance off? Kellie and Kevin, who really suffered from that quickstep down voting. The question is, will public hate towards Peter Andre mean that nobody has voted for him, or will he still have had a sympathy bounce that means we can see a better dancer down there?

Kellie says she’s feeling alright as at this point in the competition, everyone is really strong and she knows that their position on the leaderboard changed really dramatically after the quickstep-athon, so she was prepared for it.

Len says there was one ‘wobbly-fobbly’(?!) lift in their salsa, but otherwise he thought it was fantastic, so they need to come out and do it in the same way. In the Clauditorium, Georgia cries again and says she is delighted to be in the quarter-finals and Claudia drops the bombshell that next week is another theme week - musicals week. They kept that quiet, didn't they? Helen says she and Aljaž took the pressure off this week and enjoyed themselves a lot more and she finds it incredible that they are in the quarter-final. The Clauditorium looks really empty with just two couples in there, doesn’t it? 

Time for our first of two special guests this evening (my, aren’t we blessed?), Adam Lambert. He, in homage to his reality show beginnings, is standing on a plinth. His hair has also been styled into a very unfortunate side parting and looks like one of those hairstyles in the Sims catalogue that you scroll right past. After a while, we get some dancing of some sort with Karen and Kevin lying on the floor and doing lots of contemporary dance wafting, before standing up and doing something very strange, involving Kevin making weird bent knees motions, Karen being super sultry, and a really impressive move where she kind of rolls around his body through his legs in one motion, then some really cool in sync jumps that are super impressive. I have no idea what was going through their minds when they choreographed that, but I kind of liked it, it also kind of suited the song, which didn’t really seem to know what it was trying to be either. Bless Adam Lambert, who remains one of my favourite reality show contestants on the force of his personality, but his music is a bit shit.

This week in Len's lens, we look Giovanni milking the spotlight in the quickstep-athon and we are told this is what professionals do to get the attention of judges in real dancing competitions, then we see Peter and Janette executing poor footwork and him losing his frame. Claudia asks Darcey why Helen and Aljaž’s dance was almost perfect and Darcey fluffs about saying that no dancer ever thinks their dance is perfect. Valid criticism there, Darcey. We also get a reminder that Jay has improved his acting skills, which I do not believe, because we have not yet had a VT with an acting coach, the tried and tested way of achieving that breakthrough. We then see Craig and Bruno explaining their perspectives on Gleb and Anita with two clips that prove each of their points correct, and then they have a little argument about it anyway.  They then stoke up those showmance rumours by showing Jay and Aliona giving each other a cute fist bump before dancing.

And the rest of those safety announcements: Jay and Aliona; Katie and Anton, which leaves a very worried -looking Anita and public enemy number one, Peter. My fears for Anita and Gleb were unfounded, as they are safe and Peter and Janette are going home in the dance off.

Peter says he feels sorry for Janette because unlike him, she works really hard, and he calls her a little Peanut, which as we learned from It Takes Two the other week, is a thing. Bruno tells them to make sure the American smooth is actually smooth and not tense up to much, but concentrate on forming correct lines with the body.

In the Clauditorium, Anita says she is delighted at how things are changing for her as she is learning to dance; Anton is excited that they have a foxtrot next week and Claudia points out that Jay has never been in the bottom two and he thanks his many fans. I can’t stop staring at his hairline to try and figure out what's going on with it, it’s mesmerising.

Guest performance time from LD though (Il Divo) and absolutely not, sorry, even though Natalie and Gleb are dancing and that’s a combo I would be very interested in in other circumstances. [I watched it, it was an Argentine tango and she was kind of terrifying in the best possible way. - Steve] We then get a trailer VT for musicals week which opens, unfortunately, with Peter and Kellie discussing what next week will be like. The best thing about this trailer, however, is that it pretty much confirms that Around the World week is dead and buried and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Pre-dance-off chitchat now, and Kelly says she’s going to go out and enjoy herself because she enjoyed the dance the first time anyway. Kevin says Kellie is somebody who is all about having fun both in training and on the dancefloor, so he wants her to have fun again. Peter does his usual "it’s been amazing here et cetera et cetera" and Janette says that they're going to and have fun and just stops short of saying 'one last time', although that’s clearly the implication in the way she delivers it.

If anything, Kellie and Kevin’s dance is more frenetic and more sloppy this time than the last time, but they also seem to not be giving too many figs, which makes it quite enjoyable. The audience and the rest of the celebrities and pros seem to really enjoy it and Kellie blows them all kisses. Peter and Janette start out okay, and when they get into hold there is an awkward moment where Peter doesn’t know what to do with one of his arms and lets it hang like he’s Anthony Ogogo or something. He does, however make a point of looking a bit dancey as he goes and puts the cupcake down, glaring right at Craig as he does it. That’s the one time I kind of enjoyed Peter Andre this series, everybody. [Haha, me too. If there'd been a bit more of that and a bit less of the relentless awful puns and earnestness, this could all have ended very differently. - Steve] Other than that, it is still beset by some of the same problems as it had on first run, although there is perhaps a marginal improvement, or at least it hasn’t got worse with time round, unlike their jive. Peter seems really happy with how they performed and they high-five and hurled. The audience are also pretty receptive and it appears that the some sort of standing ovation but who knows whether or not it was genuine? I hope Ofcom have been checking.

Tess reads her instructions to the judges at a rattling pace, presumably as they have to fit in their comments and thus there isn’t enough running time. Craig said both couples improved, but he is going to save Kellie and Kevin; Darcey says it’s incredibly difficult but on a more assured and confident performance, she will save Kellie and Kevin; Bruno says they both gave powerful and entertaining performances, but based on the dancing that he saw, the one that was more technically accurate and had more content was Kellie and Kevin’s. Len agreed with the others decision, as has happened most weeks this series. Except last week of course. Anyway, #justice4jamelia has been served. Peter's thank you speech is much shorter than I imagined and the gist of it is that he loves everybody. He doesn’t drop in ....'and especially his kids', which is a missed opportunity. Maybe he no longer really loves them.  Janette says she's absolutely loved working with him and Peter thanks everybody and gives the audience a little bow. They dance out to Don’t You (Forget About Me) and Jay is left as the last man standing.

Next week join Steve to see which of Kellie, Katie or Anita will go (or someone else, but let’s face it probably not) in musicals week!