.... a personality.

Kara was by far the best dancer and had a good personality and a great chemistry with her partner. But there were also issues with the other contestants. Pam was excellent for a 61 year old but lacked that X Factor that you need to win (plus James isn't a popular pro).

The one male finalist had zero sex appeal and demonstrated in salsa week that he couldn't take criticism and was too needy. Also it was obvious that he was going to concentrate in his show dance on tricks at the expense of dancing which in the salsa week he demonstrated that he didn't grasp some of the basics of.

Yes I would agree with that summing-up

or the obvious reason

just really really good

Yes, I agree.

I think you left three words out of this. "IN MY OPINION". Clearly not in the opinion of the millions of people who voted him into second place. And on his own merits, not on the merits of having a pro partner that many people found attractive (although Artem did naff all for me).

Yep, that's how Jill won it. Darren is the hottes .... oh no, hang on a minute ...

If a woman wins it's because she is by far the best dancer.....and in this case the best the show has ever seen.

Pot. Kettle!

Agree about Kara and Pam but disagree about Matt (in bold).

People tend to forget that it helps that Matt take it rather seriously, and made no bones about wanting to win Strictly. In the end, he gave it all, and even though he lost to Kara, he openly (and I believe sincerely) believed that Kara was the rightful winner. Have you watched Countryfile? He, like many of his co-presenters of the show, had to travel to obscure places (and cold in this time of the year!) to film at the most ridiculous weather conditions sometimes, with very little time (and place!) to train. I say this because I noticed he could 'enjoy' his dance just as well if given enough time to train, case in point, his repeat performance in the Samba was a joy to watch (his VW I didn't like, but he still looked more relaxed in it than when he did it the first time). Just read from another thread that sometimes he only had four hours in a week to train for a dance. Thought getting into the final two was a remarkable achievement, and I believe the general public got that too, thus he was deservedly the runner up (as little mention about Aliona, the better, she may be wacky but her choreography was too marmite for me).

I agree with the underlined part, but the non threatening term is usually a description given to girls who are regarded as somewhat averagely attractive or even not attractive at all (of which I don't personally think is a description that you can give to Kara who is a beautifully attractive girl indeed).

Yes, some girls only vote for hot guys.. (thought certainly not this girl I may add) but some girls do vote for other girls too for similar reasons that they will vote for guys, like, for their personality, maybe just their looks (and they don't need to be gay to do that) and/or if they are inspired by them (like I'm sure some girl viewers were of Kara). I'm sure the dancing aspect, of which Kara was sometimes imo sublime at, played a large part in getting her votes too. I doubt Kara won just on part of Artem being (argubly) hot and almost think that its a slight insult to Kara who worked very hard as the other half of their great partnership. Kara had great arms, hands and decent posture which I suspect she already had before she even met Artem, so, I don't think he's even really to credit for in terms of how good a dancer she was. Granted, it was his choreography that displayed how good she naturally was, and I think its fair to say they both helped each other to look good. But if Kara hadn't been as naturally good as she was already, Artem probably wouldn't have had as much choreography options that he did in order to make such wonderful dances for them. Kara being a lovely human being (which I think is what people also liked about her) was something she did al by herself as well. Artem rightfully gets his fair share of credit for their success, but please give Kara her credit (in all areas) as well.

Pamela has more "X Factor" than the other two put together. Kara is very nice, but she was a bit dull and Matt was one of the blandest people I've ever seen on TV. She didn't win because some people found her a bit much and Kara and Matt had their own "storylines".