Yes but the judges are not immune from having favourites too you know and will and have abused their position to try and save their favourite and that person may be a great dancer but they are not always the most popular with the public and it is the public who are paying to vote so its only right that they have more power.

But its the viewers show, people are paying money to vote for people so Its better if we have the final say.

No - it has always been the viewer's vote splitting a tie, as it right for an entertainment show based around dance.

This has been around as an issue since S1 (Chris Parker anyone?) but the GBP mostly get the winner they want (although that may not be the choice of this board).

The judges already overmark their favourites, giving them the 'decider' would only make that worse

[quote=mindyann;45504120]Sadly ... or happily ... competitive sport/Le Tour de France doesn't rely on public voting for half the marks - else I may have bankrupted myself these last 2 years on behalf of Mark Cavendish

Ah Mark Cavendish, maybe someone even more competitive than Brendan. I'd like to see Mark standing there quiet whilst Craig and Len give their feedback!

I agree that now there is no dance off, and with precedence given to the viewer votes, then the "Tom Chambers effect" shouldn't happen. There was then no need to make the changes to the points allocated below the tied positions. This only ever works to the advantage of the people in the lower positions after the judges vote, and never those above the tied scorers.

Well it would have caused outrage amongst the relatively small proportion of viewers who voted for Tom. For the vast majority, it would simply have been an excuse to open another bottle of wine, as indeed it was when it was announced that the rules had been re-written between the main show and the results.

The "Tom is doomed" scenario was an odd one, but pretty easy to spot if you can count to 6 and remember, and how the Beeb reacted to it was always going to go against someone's views.

Ah yes - now that might be worth half the licence fee

The problem is that the people over in Strictly Towers who make up the rule book are notoriously slow off the mark. You only have to see how often someone dropping out throws them into complete disarray. Every year it comes as a complete surprise!

The series 6 semi-final muck up had to be sorted out on the hoof with a stubby pencil on the back of a lottery ticket and then last year when they still had the dance off, they re-jigged to try and avoid that sort of headache again.

Probably next year, when the difficulties of what can happen with tied leaderboard positions and no dance off have been highlighted we'll get another re-jig.

Another idea that's been suggested in the past is to have the Judges scores as a guideline only, not counting towards viewers votes. Therefore the public would not assume that their favourite was safe and all couples would be on a level playing field at the start of the voting. Then there would be a dance off between the bottom 2 and only then would the judges have a say.

The main problem with this idea is that 2 "good" dancers could end up in the bottom 2 every week.Maybe not. Maybe the public would be less likely to give sympathy votes to the naff dancers

TBF there are pros and cons to all choices of voting system and which ever one the Beeb chooses if SCD returns next year there will always be some who dissaprove

I wouldn't say it was a relatively small proportion of viewers who voted for Tom, as he won, and when it comes to the final rounds voting numbers go up as most people who don't bother voting throughout the series start to vote.

Regardless of how many people voted for Tom, the it would have caused outrage for many more people. The show is built on allowing the public to have their say. Not allowing the public their say would have caused outrage from far more people than just Tom's voters.

Perhaps I am being awfully cynical but I believe Jimi has been dropped from the show to encourage viewers to vote. The whole basis of Strictly is to make MONEY. With more headlines, more TV interviews and more public discussion about Strictly, there will be more telephone votes and more money. The same reasoning is behind the joke celeb contestant who cannot dance but is presented to the public as "Entertainment"!!! In the Daily Mail this morning we had two articles for and against Anne, over two hundred readers comments. See, it works!!!

The gaping hole in your theory is the fact that the BBC don't make any money from phone voting, so no matter how many phone votes they get, it doesn't make them any more money.

I see where you're coming from, but even though voter numbers increase as rounds progress, there would still have been a large proportion of viewers who didn't vote for Tom. Whether these people prefer rules to be re-written or prefer a small proportion of viewers to have no chance of getting the result they wanted is anyone's guess. (Watching Brendan's face as the "fudge" was announced on my kids' 2008 highlights DVD was a classic. I think he would have preferred the rule not to be re-written!!)

Post Jimi, there seems to be a strong groundswell of support for the old rules re points allocated in the case of a tie...

Moira Ross changed the way the points should be awarded this year.
With three tieing and getting 5 points Scott should have been 2 and Ann 1.

Perhaps with couples who do not make a particular percentage of the votes having to dance again with judges voting the worst off. This way there could be more than 2 couples dancing off.

Brendan couldn't say a word as he himself had manipulated the result one week....

He and Lisa had worked on producing a faultless ballroom (Foxtrot wasn't it) and had done hardly any work on their latin dance that week as he was pretty sure that he & Lisa would be in the dance off.....

In the DO they got to do their extremely high scoring ballroom against poor Austin's averagely scoring salsa - the judges HAD to put Lisa through that week although I wouldn't mind betting my bottom dollar that she was the lowest combined score......

That's just playing by the rules, though. Good luck to them, even though Austin fired out. Possibly ungentlemanly conduct, though.

Sorry if this has already been covered, but I haven't read the entire thread.

The OP asked if this was the biggest drop, and I was reminded earlier on another thread that Rachel Stevens dropped from 4th to last, and may have been eliminated but for the dance off. She was actually officially in 2nd place on the leader board, with 3 dancers tied for 1st place (Austin, Tom, Cherie).

So again, a situation created by a tie, althought his time above rather than below on the leader board.

Without that dance off we may have missed some of Rachel's amazing dances that followed.

oh god I had forgotten about Lisa's incredibly boring ballroom that they always raved about as I nodded off.

Agreed, but I was looking at it from the perspective of the better dancers over the ones with limited entertainment value.

But, if indeed it is the public's right for the reasons that you describe, then no-one can be surprised if entertainment value (however limited or dubious) triumphs over dance technique and talent.

Then we should not be surprised with what we get (and on a more generic note, and not aimed at anyone in this thread, we should not complain when the better dancers get the boot whilst complete no-hopers remain, as per the public's will).

Except that the BBC does not make any money from it (indeed, they are not permitted to do so under the terms of their Charter and under various Editorial Guidelines). They cannot and do not profit from the phone voting, and never have done.

I dont think she did......hasnt she only been in charge for this series ? and this system was introduced for series 7

Why don't people realise this? We have been banging on about it ever since they dropped the CiN stopped getting money from the votes.

But that was with the old tie-scoring system. With the new system, she would have scored 2nd not 4th and may possibly have not been in the bottom two at all.

That is true, but I was just answering the OP's question about other dancers who may have dropped from a seemingly "safe" positon

Well, although the beeb don't financially benefit directly from the voting profits, it is still in their best interest to have as many of us invested enough to want to pick up the phone.

The "shock" exit wasnt actually a shock and I am sure that while Dancing Girl wasnt correct about the actual money from calls, there was a certain amount of stroking involved to arrive at Saturday's result. The amount of tied scores, the diversity of dances etc. Infact in IanCam's report both Len and another judge (Bruno, I think) predicted a shocker for the weekend. The two judges, one could say were responsible for so many tied at the bottom