Not a regular poster on these forums but something annoyed me on Saturday and I just wanted to know what people on this forum thought.

Gavin has not yet danced well in the the last couple of weeks. Having said that the routine contained moments where he is really good but he has not been able to maintain the level throughout the dance and his not showed enough in the performance to sell the routine

In his comments Craig has not offered any constructive comments or pointed out good things Gavin has done. In short he has been plain rude and nasty. His marks of 3 and 4 were just being vindictive rather than providing a fair assessment of the dance. As it happens the slight overmarking of other judges has meant his overall mark and placing are about right.

This is not an Ann situation of a joke contestant but someone who does try to produce a decent effort but is maybe not destined to be great dancer. Craig is making no effort to help him and just seems to want to destroy his confidence totally.

Do you think Craig has been fair with Gavin?

He fancies him - but can't have him?

I must admit I had thought he was upset that Gavin kissed Bruno

While I must admit I do usually love Craig, when it comes to poorer contestants he isn't as good at giving constructive criticism as to those who usually score higher. Possibly because if he started on things to improve, he'd never stop!

I don't think Gavin's jive was as awful as Craig made out. It wasn't wonderful, but some sections were very good. It didn't flow very well, and breaking up the dance to run to the judges and do the bum shake then run back again just seemed silly (I have nothing against guys shaking their bums in general, but it broke up the dance and made it look worse than it was). Gavin did a reasonable job with a dance he hated.

Of course, it's possible that Craig was deliberately being nasty in an attempt to get Gavin the sympathy vote?

I am a Gavin fan and accept he isnt all that good BUT I agreed with Katya about her comment to Craig that he was writing when Gavin was dancing .....I noticed it myself.....and Craig was rather rude to her I thought.

Craig is the only judge that marks Gavin (or anyone for that matter) properly.

I've felt in the past especially, that other judges have had a separate mark scheme for Gavin where he gets extra points for improvement or cracking a smile!

Craig is more objective and marks Gavin relative to the others. And on occasions where he's been a little harsh, one of the other judges has usually compensated by being overly generous (e.g. Quickstep and Cha Cha).

I do think that he does mark gavin very harshly compared to say Patsy who often looked clumsy in her dancing to me

Gavin is by no means a natrurall dancer but at times does roduce sme goo d steps he needs to learn to do these all through the dance , Katya to my mind would be beter off tryign to choreograph a simle routine that he can repeat ell done steps in ans so shine more

If he does this perhaps Craig may be more impressed

How did i miss that comment - i may look at it again

I was annoyed for a few reasons regarding Gavin on saturday - firstly Craig saying he would give Ann a run for her money - now i know Gavin is not the best dancer in the world but to make any comparison with Ann and any of the other celebrities is just insulting. At least Gavin is really trying to improve Ann is just surviving off her comic routine.
Then on the results show watching the judges slagging off Gavin and even Matt backstage while having only sympathy for Scott was out of order.
And lastly i just wish Katya would do a simple routine with Gavin and stop with all the props and silly stuff - he was dressed like he was going to do a lindy hop rather than a jive on saturday. He is doing the foxtrot on sat - i'm hopeful for a good routine and even if he goes well it will be on a high

I agree with you there , have they forgotten that gavin is back in training for proffessional rugby after more than a year out , personally I would have thought that may make him the teeniest bit tired, but i dont see him complainign like some others

Craig has consistently been very unpleasant to and about,Gavin. He doesn't give any, constructive criticism. That makes it look personal - which it probably is. There's no excuse for writing notes when someone is dancing if a judge is looking down at the desk for quite some time.

Not to mention the fact that the audience wastes time by booing every negative comment

Craig does however have enough time to be deliberately and pointlessly insulting .

I think Craig fails to give constructive criticism only when he knows there is no hope. So he does so with Ann and Gavin.

Yes, Gavin did have a good section in the middle of that jive, but the rest of it was pretty bloody awful, IMO. The trouble is that we are nine weeks into the competition and Gavin is going backwards where other contestants (bar one) are improving. I don't know what Craig could have said that would be constructive, since nothing said so far has made a blind bit of difference. Going for the comedy angle and wiggling his bum in the judges' faces does rather smack of desperation, hence the comparison with Widdy. Katya does way too much 'faffing abaht' in the choreography, which may be appealing to the public, but doesn't endear the routine to the judges. Well, that's how I see it, anyway. Craig is, erm, direct in his remarks, but that's his role and he is by a long way the most consistent of the panel.

Katya is the choreographer (presumably) and Gavin does what Katya teaches him (presumably). Hope Katya pulls together a good routine for her pupil on Saturday.

I agree that some of that choreography didn't help at all but I still maintain that Craig has consistently been unecessarily unpleasant, rude and dismissive.
His categorising Gavin as being akin to Ann has caught on as an opinion probably just as his ' floorboards' jibe did. Craig could have considered other competitors to have been hopeless but he wasn't as rude, to them.
I find it rather sad that Craig is valued partly for his ability to belittle, other people. I think the correct term for that would be ' cheap jibes'. However bad at dancing someone is or isn't, if they are making a tremendous effort, honesty is fine. Bullying, isn't.

If anything he overmarked him Gavin is just out of his depth. On the otherhand he was better than Scott.

He gave a three. Seriously, you think that was overmarking? I can understand that there wasn't much actual dance content and that would affect the score, but Craig does still have an attitude where Gavin is concerned. The effort he put in was worth more than a paltry three.

But Len's comment of "I hated it, WE all hated it" is the one that irked me most. That was a rotten thing to say, and untrue. He sounded nothing like a Head Judge, more like a stroppy kid. And he was the one laughing at Gavin's bum wiggling in front of him. So he hated it a lot then

Anyway, they are wanting Gavin out by the looks of things. And if Katya doesn't give Gavin a solid routine - and proper dance steps throughout - he's a gonner
She must'nt crave the attention so. She must let the dancing wow us, not the extras she puts in. It's not enough.

Was I the only one to be when Gavin said that Katya had been ill in the week and he'd had to train with her partner?

Nothing had been said about that at all, either on ITT or on the VT's to the best of my knowledge?

Surely, that would have to affect the training/teaching/performance. Not saying any allowances should be made, but it would have been interesting to have known rather than just the 'I don't like the jive' stuff that we had.

I've though a couple of times that Craig marks for Gavin were too low. None of his routines have been disasters of the kind that would normally attract a mark like a 3 or a 4. Each dance has had at the very least, one good section. Gavin did say early on when Tess was doing her bit after their performance that he though Craig had a problem with him.

I do wonder if Craig is punishing Gavin for his dancing, rather than making him and I agree that to say Gavin could give Ann a run for her money was insulting.

Maybe the 'lobotomy' comment from Gavin some weeks back has not been forgotten by Craig?

You see on ITT the way Craig groans when viewing Gavin - not in a good way btw lol. It's like he has no time for him. He's very dismissive.

Thinking about it, Craig even re-enacted his 'favourite' dance step of Gavin Jive's, backstage That's so wrong! They attack him for not giving his all, but they seem to delight in mocking him when he tries. Bruno did it with Patsy's AT too. Complete p!sstake. What are the judges playing at this year

When Gavin and Katya were on ITT on Monday Gavin said they'd done no training that day. Why they hadn't, if I remember correctly, was because they were both busy. What they were busy doing I don't know because no other explanation was given.

I think a score of 3 was fair for Gavin's jive. It had one good section, but the rest of it was truly awful.

Craig's 3 was about as believable as Alesha's marks for Scott.

I'm no dancer but even I thought about Scott's trippie steps and his partner grabbing him around the neck to get him into position (don't know the official terms) as Scott's pretty much always on the ball.

If the judges don't have a clear and unimpeded view of the dancers it's no surprise that they are unable to mark appropriately. I'm surprised none of the judges have recommended the desk should be moved if that's the case.