So, this is a bit different because I am going to be writing about the TV show Strictly Come Dancing for the next few weeks. I won’t just be writing about Strictly but it is the starting point for the next 21 posts and I will probably go into the kind of TV detail that might seem totally surplus to requirements. A TV show, a big-audience, mainstream TV show – you might be asking yourself if it really needs any more publicity on a tiny little blog? And what is the point?
There are several reasons I’ve found myself doing this quite unlikely writing project at this particular time. One is that things are grim in many, many ways right now and there are only so many times I can write about yet another terrible Tory UK government, the climate crisis and the fact that we’re all going to die (always a popular theme with poets). This blog has featured all kinds of writing styles and subject matter but this is probably my lightest outing yet – actual light entertainment. Only this January I was writing a month of daily posts about folk-acoustic songwriters (not exactly TV Quick content) and I hardly even watch mainstream/entertainment TV so how did I end up watching 19 series of UK Strictly and a smattering of other countries’ versions of the show? OMG, as Strictly “grumpy judge” Craig Revel Horwood might say with his mouth dropping oh-so dramatically to the desk, how on earth did that happen?
It started with a mother, as so many things do. In the summer of 2004 (just after the first series of Strictly was shown on the BBC) my 80-year-old mother, Margaret, came to live with my partner Mark, our daughter Heather and me up in Angus in Scotland (that’s her in the photo, on Montrose beach, she brought her little dog too). Mum was a pretty active person in the daytime but when evening came she loved TV (dramas, tennis, crime shows, music). She had watched the first series of Strictly earlier that year before she moved up and absolutely loved it. Born in 1924 in Edinburgh, her young, going-out-to-dances days were mainly during World War II and she had memories of quickstepping, maybe even foxtrotting, in places down in Bath, where both she and her mother and sister worked around that time. The quicksteps were always her favourite dances on Strictly and she would tap her feet jauntily and smile for every beat of the songs, whether she knew them or not (her pop music knowledge stopped somewhere around Tommy Steele). Like a lot of older viewers, I suspect, she enjoyed the dances that most took her back to her younger days, to a time before husbands and children, before being widowed (twice) and bringing up a lot of children alone. She was not at all romantic or nostalgic about the misery of war but that era was still her youth, the time when she was just a young woman with a certain amount of freedom, a bicycle and a full set of hopes and ambitions. She had had a complicated childhood, qualified in social work in Edinburgh during the war and wanted to work with children most of all. She lived a long and interesting life and for the last few years of it Strictly was a good friend. She really appreciated the humour (no matter how corny), the music, the elegance and the sparkle.
That first autumn living with us in 2004 she well and truly infected our 4-year-old daughter Heather with the Strictly bug too. I suppose I could have just left them to it but there was so little we all did together early on in our joining of households that it seemed unfair to not even try to join in. It was a bit of change for me – I had been a rocker in my teens, a full-time raver in my 20s, a recovering raver in my 30s, and I had never really liked musicals or anything like that beyond childhood. But family can make you end up doing things you never imagined you would – for some it’s going to endless freezing football matches, for others it’s hours of World of Warcraft or a whole lotta Bake Off, but for me it was Strictly Come Dancing. If I wanted to stay connected with the women either side of me, generationally speaking, it was learn to love the samba or lose them forever. I gave it a go.
All these years later (18 years!) and here I am – a person who has watched hours and hours of Strictly Come Dancing (but not a bloody minute of that miserable weasel Matt Hancock on one of our other primetime TV shows this year – there’s a man who should be eliminated from each and every competition). I’ve watched so much Strictly that I’m going to do a post every day* till 17 December (the day of the final of the current Strictly series, series 20) and each post will be about a series of the show (and other things from around the time it was broadcast, both political and personal). Over the course of these posts I will address some of the issues that newer viewers of the show can seem surprised or disappointed by (e.g., why the audiences vote the way they do). An old Leeds connection (Chumbawamba’s Alice Nutter, now a busy playwright and screenwriter) got me thinking about this with some of her tweets about Strictly this year (she’s been watching it on and off for ten years, “religiously” for four). As someone who has watched it since the beginning of time, or at least that’s how it feels partway through one of the longer Saturday night shows at the start of a series, I started to wonder how I had spent so much of my life with this TV show, what it had taught me over the years, what it meant to me and the rest of the family, and why I keep watching it. I say I watch it because my daughter does but she also watches The Masked Singer (and Dancer) and I don’t watch either of those. Strictly is a strange creature (always changing, always staying the same) and even though I’ve tried to stop watching it here and there I still haven’t managed to quit. Am I under some kind of spell?
For all of these posts I will be filling in a sort of questionnaire for each series of the show. Below is the first of these questionnaires to give you an idea of the areas I will be covering and this one is about series 1 to give you an idea of how it’s going to work. As I didn’t actually watch the first series this one has a couple of “don’t knows” as answers. I’ve watched all the other series and they talk about this origin series quite a bit so I know far more than you should know about something you’ve never seen. Still, feel free to fill in the blanks if you know more than me and keeeep commenting if you can.
Series 1
Dates
May-July 2004 (8 weeks, 8 couples).
That time period in context
Tony Blair was still UK Prime Minister (despite taking the country into the Iraq War in 2003), Piers Morgan was dismissed as editor of the Daily Mirror, José Mourinho was named the new manager of Chelsea F.C. and Peppa Pig first aired on TV. The movie Mean Girls was released (total classic). Please note I am very much against the institution of the monarchy and none of the royals will be mentioned in these posts (apart from these two sentences). It’s like they don’t even exist.
Judges
Len Goodman (head judge), Arlene Phillips, Craig Revel Horwood, Bruno Tonioli.
Presenters
Bruce Forsyth and Tess Daly (main show – that’s all there was, no It Takes Two).
Addition to format
It was new so N/A.
The final for this series was in Blackpool Tower Ballroom (which hasn’t always been the case).
Dancers
(celebrities first, professional partners second; couples listed in order of elimination with winners last)
Jason Wood and Kylie Jones
David Dickinson and Camilla Dallerup
Verona Joseph and Paul Killick
Claire Sweeney and John Byrnes
Martin Offiah and Erin Boag
Lesley Garrett and Anton du Beke
Christopher Parker and Hanna Karttunen
Natasha Kaplinsky and Brendan Cole
Celebrities we had heard of before the series (and how we knew them)
David Dickinson (“cheap as chips”, heavy on the bronzer), Claire Sweeney (Brookside, when I watched it in the ’90s), Martin Offiah (rugby), Lesley Garrett (singer), Natasha Kaplinksy (news reader/presenter).
Who did we vote for?
My Mum voted for Natasha.
Celebrities we liked more after the series
The only ones my Mum ever mentioned were Natasha and Lesley. I don’t think she ever watched (or listened to) a soap opera in her life. She said they were too depressing.
Was it obvious who was going to win?
I think so (Natasha won).
Were there articles in the papers moaning about one of the celebrities being good because they’d danced before?
Don’t know, sorry.
Did it matter?
Does it ever? It’s light entertainment. The “papers” in question might want to think about covering some actual news.
Was there an obvious “shouldn’t stay in long but did” contestant?
From comments made later in other series I think that was actor Christopher Parker (Eastenders). And if you think you haven’t heard about him lately that’s because he left acting and is a consultant at a law firm.
Shock exit?
Don’t know, sorry (Lesley Garrett maybe – did people expect her in the final instead of Christopher?).
The story of the series?
The producers realising “Bloody hell, this is going to be a hit show”. You can tell from the production values of the first show that they weren’t exactly betting on it being such a world-beater (the format started in the UK and is now licensed to more than 75 countries). Brand-tastic, really.
I think there was a romance/relationship story in this series (the beginning of what the tabloids now call the “Strictly curse” – broken relationships, new relationships etc.) but I tend to be about ten years out of date with such stories because (a) I’m not a tabloid person and (b) I think that really people’s personal relationships are their own business (unless they force them into the public sphere by selling their wedding photos to Hello magazine and so on).
And our family - what was going on with us at the time?
We moved house quite a bit in this particular year. We had been in Scotland for 2 years (moved up from Yorkshire) and in 2004 we moved from a cottage by the sea to a house in town, then to a suburban house all in the same year. My Mum was settling in after moving up from her last home in Nottinghamshire (and no doubt wondering if moving away from all her friends had been the right thing to do). Heather had started school nursery and I’d been doing some advocacy (no sequins involved). Mark was doing everything else.
To read the rest of the posts click on Newer Post (below) or these links: Series 2, Series 3, Series 4, Series 5, Series 6, Series 7, Series 8, our Dancing with the Stars interlude, Series 9, Series 10, Series 11, Series 12, Series 13, Series 14, Series 15, Series 16, Series 17, Series 18, Series 19 and Series 20.
*Anyone’s who’s been a recent visitor here will know I’ve done a few post-a-day projects in recent years, mainly due to the Fun A Day Dundee project that I’ve taken part in. I did a poem with illustrations in Jan 2020, poems and posts about moving house in Jan 2021 and posts about 31 brilliant songs/songwriters in Jan 2022. There is no Fun A Day Dundee project being organised for 2023 and that’s probably why I’ve ended up doing this one. Just hooked on the idea of one-a-day, I suppose.
