Natalie Lowe was a little too tall for Ricky Whittle - he struggled lifting her especially in the Rock 'n' roll and Jive. Poor Vincent, bless him, was overwhelmed by Natalie Cassidy, nice girl that she was, she just looked bigger than she was because he's so slight!

I would like to see a better quality of celebs, and when i say that i don't mean people that we all recognise as that doesn't bother me, i want people that will be able to dance!
(i know this is hard though as alot of previous contestants have looked good on paper).

Ditch rock n roll but keep Charleston in there somewhere.

Replace Alesha with Karen and get rid of Darcey aswell.

First week have the males perform ballroom on Friday, females br on Saturday and nobody eliminated. The following week the same but latin and then have a double elimination, one female and one male.

I don't mind the non traditional music for Paso or Tango but i'd like bettter music choices in general for all the dances.

I don't ask for much the first one is the one i really want to be taken notice of, all the others i can live with if they don't change.

Well perhaps Strictly shouldn't include lifts then if the bigger people will struggle to do them. I said women because it's very rare you would see a female lifting a male during a dance but anything's possible...

It's just a change I think would be beneficial to the show, I don't think it should apply to men because bigger men tend to be able to dance better than bigger women, just look at Darren Gough who was overweight but still fantastic.

I just think why bother putting someone through that kind of physical strain because dancing is demanding enough on the body of fit people, so it must be a lot more difficult for bigger people.

I never saw Natalie struggle in terms of fitness though. In fact sports people seem to struggle more in this area with old injuries (e.g. Jade and Tuffers, and on DOI Sharon). Kate Garraway is very slim but also struggled with fitness.

But what about Darren Gough, Mark Ramprakash, Matt Dawson?

Also, Jade's injury wasn't an old one, she popped her knee out of its socket which could have happened to any of the contestants. You only have to watch Natalie's dancing/VTs to see she was struggling.

This is the intro to last weeks DWTS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SP7QD_TBFI

SCD should open like this as well [pls lord cut the awful Tess/Bruce dance/joke thingy].

I would also like a sparkly new set and band like DWTS.

Cut the celebs back to 13, have no elimination in week one.

Introduce an new Balcony scoring area to replace the backstage 'tesspit' like the one here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSjm_iAtkoc

Basicaly i want to use the production team behind DWTS and keep the pros and Dances of STRICTLY

I dont think Jade struggled with fitness - in fact I think she was the fittest celeb we ever had on the show. She may have got her injury partly because her legs were so strong - tearing a ligament by trying to stand up from a sitting position.
Many of the athletes were carring old injuries though, such as Matt Dawson, Austin, Jade etc, but they usually were able to just take the pain.

Athletes make some of the best contestants, because they usually have no dance experience, but know how to train under coaching, versus the actors, who usually have dance experience and performance skills, but are a bit fragile.

Nice to see some posters still can't get over their favourites not winning last year ...

The biggest single problem Strictly has is the gulf between the public and the judges. This was pretty much contained up to Series 6, then everything exploded with Sergeant-gate - and, TBH, the show has never been quite the same since. It lost a kind of innocence it previously had and, crucially, opened itself up to a media onslaught which then continued all the way through Series 7. Some appalling choices were made by the Head of Entertainment and SCD's Exec Producer and it is to be hoped that their departures will give the show a chance to go back to what it excels at.

The first job the new Head of Entertainment and Exec Producer have to do is put the judges back in their boxes. They were empowered in Series 5 and have since abused that power, more and more blatantly. Arlene's exit may have been mismanaged, but it was absolutely necessary. We now need to lose Bruno, at the very least, and preferably Len, too.

Additionally, rather than the 50/50 split, the balance needs adjusting so that the public have the upper hand (60/40? 70/30?). That way we can lose dancers favoured by, and overmarked, by the judges, and get greater drama on screen. Imagine how much better the SCD6 final would have been had it been Tom/Austin/Rachel.

As for the contestants: we don't need lots of well-known celebs. Strictly is a starmaker: Jill Halfpenny, Chris Hollins, Alesha Dixon, Gethin Jones and Mark Ramprakash all prove that. What we need are celebs who have personalities. That is what was lacking last year and why so many people latched on to Team Cola, who exuded way more charisma than anyone else and turned in enough show-stopping performances to steal the spotlight away from those who were more technically adept.

Just no more overqualified pop princesses, please. Been there, done that. :yawn:

Cut to 12 couples.

Clear rules before the series starts to cover every eventuality and not just fudging it at the last minute.

No dance off from quarters onwards.

No fifth judge (there must be easier ways to deal with the maths problem).

No live Sunday show (as rumoured in some papers) - it's not X Factor! It would be too demanding on the couples who would lose valuble practice time.

Split the show again and have a seperate results show, preferably on Sat evening.

Include several 30 something males with 'personalities' who can dance a little bit, then the winner might no be a foregone conclusion after about week 4 (which is when I knew Chris would win)! We can't change the viewer dynamic but at least give them something to think about!!

In series seven, they did make it biased in favour of the public. The only area where there is still a problem is when the numbers get down and the judges influence starts to grow, and most opinion seems to be that the dance-off should be stopped at somewhere around that point ( or not be included at all).

I wouldn't call them pop-princesses, as they are usually past the peak of their careers, and they are not all brilliant dancers - Heather, for example. Generally they have been good for the show.

Totally agree about Strictly being better off with people with personality and not needing big names as contestants, but they do need to do better on the guest performer side.

I quite like that Chris and Ola could win, but only because I just couldn't get attached to Ricky and Natalie, so although I do want the dance contest to be the main feature, I'm a bit like James Jordan in being converted to how the entertainment has to be considered almost as important.
Dont think I could take anyone worse than Chris winning though - he was lucky Ola could make him look that good.

Heather isn't a pop princess - she's a pop goddess! How dare you!

The types I'm referring to are Emma Bunton/Rachel Stevens - designed to have Bruno and Craig going OTT before they've even started dancing. More to the point, they have an added advantage as they are used to intensive choreography training - so it's not really much of a stretch for them. (Sure, the choreography they learned may not have been as complex - but the intensity of the training is very similar).

At the end of the day, Strictly isn't a dancing competition, however. It's about celebrities learning ballroom and latin dancing. There is a balance between the dancing and the reality show, and it pretty much trod that successfully until Sergeant-gate. Ever since, it has struggled to mesh the two together again.

No, Chris wasn't as technically proficient as Ricky - but that isn't why the audience engages with the celebs. They look for chemistry both on and off the dancefloor. That's the format. I still think Natalie took the wrong tack last year by concentrating entirely on judge-pleasing routines when instead she should have let Ricky's personality shine through more. Had she played things differently, SCD7 might have been a more even - and more dramatic - competition.

Aw Rachel was my favourite ever contestant and i liked Emma also. Would you put Alesha under that heading as i liked her aswell



I forgot to add in my list i would like better guest singers (if we HAVE to have them) The Jersey Boys are always welcome though

Less celebs (that first evening was tortueous to watch 3+ hours in one go)
Less zelebs (ie zed list)
No Alesha
No dance off
Seperate results show on same night though
Get rid of Pro's that think they are more important than the show
ditch Tess
retire Bruce (I am a fan of Brucie but I think its time)
ditch the band
ditch the cameramen
stop Len being too pompous
stop Bruno from speaking
stop Craig from giving out too many 10's (was he on drugs last season?!)


and you might just have a decent show in there somewhere!!

Which pros do you think 'think they are more important than the show'?


Craig has a right to give out however many 10s he wants, I see no problem with that - he's much more reserved in marking than all the other judges put together, so when he gives a 10, it's deserved! From my memory he only gave about 5, which in a longer show is not much more than normal. Bruno, if he is still a judge, has a right to speak (so getting rid of him would make it much better all round!) and likewise Len can't really be censored at all.....


Ditching Tess is a fantastic idea though, wish I'd included that in my list! And if they don't get rid of her, at least teach her and Bruce to pronounce people's names properly!

Changes? I had better not give my first one as it would give rise to another argument.

Secondly, no dance off.

I maintain that the DWTS scoring system is the best possible one. Fiddling around with the proportion of the public vote vs judge vote is contrary to the "50% public vs 50% judges" ethos of the show which runs back to series 1. Also you have to be careful - if you want a Tom vs Austin vs Rachel final, you have to tilt the scales enough to get rid of Lisa, but not so much you end up with, say Christine in the final over Rachel.

A directly proportional system (where the % of the judges score a contestant gets is added to their % of the public vote) is far better, because it reflects the nuance of the public and the judges vote far more than the current blunt system. For instance the Series 6 quarter (a close run thing where all the contestants do well in one dance and mess up the other) would look like this :

Rachel : 26.1%
Tom : 25.1%
Lisa : 24.7%
Austin : 24.1%

whereas the series 7 quarter final (where Ricky does exceptionally, Chris and Ali both acquit themselves well, and where Laila screws up royal) looks like :

Ricky : 29.3%
Ali : 26.9%
Chris : 25%
Laila : 18.8%

The benefits are obvious - the public vote counts such that a really popular person will always be safe, but the judges vote counts in that if there's a massive gulf in quality, it's very difficult to overcome. It crops the Sergeants whilst keeping the Austin/Chris/Toms. Dancing quality counts, as does public favour. I'd argue you could even keep a dance-off between the bottom 2 as a safety net in this scenario and it'd still work (with the added bonus of removing the possiblity of someone being doomed to dance-off before the vote even occurs, or the most popular person being dumped in the dance-off because of the bizarre results thrown up by the 1-2-3 system of rankings)


She didn't concentrate entirely on judge-pleasing routines. The back-flip in the salsa and the giant overhead lift in the American Smooth were put in with Natalie fully aware that the judges would hate them. I get the impression that Natalie choreographed her routines neither for the judges, nor the public - she choreographed them for herself and Ricky. Personally I like that approach, because I think it's more true to the spirit of teaching someone how to dance, not teaching them how to connect with an audience (which, being celebs, a lot of of them can do already), but I can see why it wasn't a public vote winner and why it turned some people off as "selfish" or "not connecting with the audience", and also why some people don't tune it for that sort of thing.

Where does Anton fit into this equation? He said at the start of the series quite clearly that he was going to teach Laila basic technique so she could actually be a good dancer, and the public could go hang until she was actually good if they wanted "entertainment". This is a basic open admission of what Natalie's being accused of (on very little evidence other than "the public didn't like her routines") and yet it was either ignored or praised at the time.

I would like to see numbers reduced to 12 or failing that a couple of double evictions. (Even with 12, I would prefer all couples to do at least 3 weeks, to get to know them and see more before voting, and then have double evictions for the next couple of weeks.)

I would like all contestants to have had some basic dance training already and the voting to be as per DWTS scoring system.

I would quite like the show to be on a Sunday rather than Saturday too, maybe with a weekly update show on a Friday or Saturday.

It Takes Two gives us so many updates already, there's no need at all for another updates show! And the BBC will never consider moving Strictly from Saturday primetime - they don't have anything else that's even remotely as popular to go up against the X Factor at least partially.

I don't disagree with your idea of seeing everyone dance a few times before an eviction, but surely this year's format of everyone doing ballroom and latin before the vote suffices for that?

Sunday show is something I'd like to see, NOT what I think will happen!

I meant have an updates show in place of some or all of ITT .

I do think seeing ballroom and latin last year was a good thing, but I would prefer personally to see everyone do a couple of each, and see the partnerships develop a little more than we see in one week. Just what I would like to see.

Ah ok, you mean something like what they did with DOI this year? It would certainly freshen the show up for people who don't watch ITT

And I think you're right about the partnerships - I think the current format is harsh on couples who leave early. Chris and Ola showed it is possible to overcome the lack of airtime in VTs etc to still display the partnership, but it would be good to give people a couple of weeks to overcome nerves and start to perform!

I would like to see the following changes:-

A new set design - The current one looks dated. It needs to be larger and contemporary so each couple dance is presented well.

Get rid of Bruce - He does not add anything to the show.

Reduce the number of couple to 12/14 and ensure that there is a 3 couple final whatever happens during the series.

A change in format - The show needs to be much brisker and have more pace. In the last series the show became predictable and boring.

Ditch Bruce and Tess for Chris Hollins and Karen Hardy

The dance off must be scrapped once we get down to the two dances per cocuple stage.

And no stage school graduates please

What I would like to see happen:
-keep 14 or 16 couples, but have at least a couple of double eliminations scheduled (then if someone drops out due to illness they could drop one of the double eliminations and have a 3 person final)
- replace Bruce with Aled Jones and replace Tess with Claudia or Alesha Dixon
- Replace Alesha as a judge with Karen Hardy, and replace Len with anyone, I don't care, as long as he isn't in it.
- If they must have the dance off, get rid of Bruno and have 3 judges (so no head judge needed) or, if they want 4 judges, in the event that their votes are tied, go to the public vote to decide who leaves.
-No vote off until we have seen all couples dance
- Replace the cameraman with one who actually knows how to do the job properly
- Reinstate the red button commentary

-I like 16 celebrities but if we can have 16 well known celebrities.

-Less actors/ actresses- this year really suffered because it was dominated by soap stars etc.

-I'd like to see some more dances bought into play- Bolero, Lambada?

- I also prefer the male/ females being seperated into two groups.

Oooh I know, it was so cruel them making Ricky lift her up and spin her on his shoulders.
There's nothing in the rules that says the men have to fling the women around like a Barbie on a bungie.

I demand the cameramen of the last series be rounded up in pairs in the dead of night, and shot if they cannot escape from people with Uzis darting in from 15 metres to 2 metres away and running in circles around them. Then we prop them up if necessary for me to score them for footwork and artistic impression.
Oh, and happy Easter!