I'm with you Winnie.

I see no reason to make this another watered down dance show.

For me the fun was watching celebs who could not dance a step end up quiet reasonable dancers.

I had no interest in the likes of Alesha who could obviously dance and hardly improved from the first week to the last.

As far as I am concerned it is all about the person who has improved the most, not the one who simpers and laughs at every ones corny jokes.

So when it's to be a bit of fun maybe they can give 4 tens everybody already and be done with it. Why should anybody put an effort in if they won't be judged properly. And surely, Dixon won't be able to tell them what was wrong or what details they should work on to make the dance better. They were probably thinking the judges were too distant, too academic (as if that was possible with Bruno there) and they needed a vox populi there. Which is stupid IMO. That was the part of the fun, that we could be angry with the judges as was Arlene ogling male dancers

I think Strictly automatically rules out the tackier zelebs purely through the amount of effort you have to put in. It's far harder to put yourself through 3-4 months of intensive dance training and live shows 7 days a week than it is to sit on a sound-stage pretending to be a jungle for a couple of weeks. So long as the pros remain committed to teaching people how to dance, I'd say any classy celebs who want to truly learn will look at the show will still see it as an appealing prospect. If anything knowing they won't have Arlene perving over them or slagging them off will probably make them more likely to compete.

And really looking at the finallists from the last series which is classier? A soap actor, a washed-up pop star and a Living TV presenter or a soap actor, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, and Mr Sulu?

Alesha seemed to do a lot of things right as a competitor. I remember Matthew pointing out to her that 'going for it' did not produce as good a result as having more control and doing it the way that experience had shown looked best. Subsequently, I remember Alesha asking him if that was the best way that move could be done, and Matthew saying there was a better way, and she said she wanted to learn it the better way.
Shows me she has an appreciation of doing things the right way.

My main problems with her judging are:-

She doesn't know enough to be able to judge the level of difficulty of all the dancing she will see. Len can tell how difficult a routine is, and knows what they were trying to achieve. Now Len, with all his experience is having his job down-graded and reduced in salary and having an almost complete novice given the same job.

The professionals probably already found Bruno, Craig and Arlene's opinions on ballroom hard to swallow, so they are also having their work degraded by saying a novice can judge them.

If Alesha was replacing Tess "the plank" Daly, I'd be over the moon. But becoming a judge of professional dancers and their partner's with less than a year's training? No. Definitely not.

I'm not fussed about Arlene going - she wasn't the be all and end all of the show, and definitely grated the nerves when she was perving over her favourites - but why not get a judge who knows what they are saying?

Personally, I can't wait for the first time she tells Brendan or James that their choreography wasn't quite right.... Or her vote is the one that keeps Matt Cutler out of the bottom two...

Or maybe she's just going to trot out the old line "your performance was exciting/wonderful/poor because that is ALL she can comment on???

I am saddened by the appointment of Alesha.

She just isn't qualified enough to be on the panel, before anyone says she will only be judging performance, that will get a bit boring. There is only so much she can say, and we keep getting the same old lines, at least the other judges can vary it a little as they have much more scope to comment on. If she starts cackiling like she does, Len will be much more grumpy than he already is lol.

I feel this is a bad decsion, before it was an entertainment/dance programme, pleasing both camps, the dancers (like me) and the people who like the entertainment. Now with this decsion it will turn into a fun entertaiment show, and Jay Hunt has already stated this series will cocentrate on fun and not a dance competiton.

I feel we are losing that uniquness about the programme it had something for everyone that why it was special and BBC's flagship programme, now it will be just another entertainment programme.

Why can't Jay Hunt she why the programme was a ratings winner, it was because it was diffrent and a family based programme not just another entertaiment reality programme, which it is sadly becoming.

Winnie