The one and only time I have ever been influenced by looks was series 5. I adored Gethin and still do, but more now in a big sister kind of way as I am old enough to be his mother and having met him several times anything else would just seem weird. I think he was a beautiful ballroom dancer aswell. Alesha was more talented than him and I voted for her in the final.

I supported Ramps because I liked him and his dancing but didnt fancy him in anyway.

Since then I have supported Rachel, Chris (again because I liked him and no one else really grabbed me) Kara and this year Jason & Chelsee (again Jason not for any other reason than I quite like him)

Harry doesnt do it for me looks wise or dancing wise even though I think he is good.....he doesnt bring anything of himself onto the floor, he is just going through the motions, even though the motions are good it leaves me thinking meh ! I want to see some struggle or angst or something not just the same expression on the face no matter what hes doing....its really his only fault but its a fatal one for me.

I think Harry has it in the bag to be honest. I work in a busy Central London Hospital where nearly every single female in the departments I have contact with are all rooting for Harry, I would say a good 90% of those think Chelsee is the better dancer but Harry is fit. All these women are casual viewers and probably don't vote, their reasons for liking him range from he's sweet/hot/fit, have you seen the body on him etc. not one person I have spoken to has mentioned his dancing as being the reason to support him.

Is this an ominous way of saying Aliona has not brought emotion and zing out of Harry into the partnership, so that two persons are dancing as two persons? Voters won't like that.


My impression is that persons who work in hospitals see so many ill and troubled bodies that they want to see glowingly healthy young bodies as psychological antidote, even going to the extent of joining nudist clubs. Harry would fit this bill even without disrobing.

That will explain it then, my nursing skills must be terrible, cos he does nothing for me but then again I was a busted fan in my younger days

I too was a bust fan in my younger days.
In fact still am.


http://www.digitalspy.ie/showbiz/s10...ss-me-now.html

Harry has the hospitals vote sewn up now.

I think it's way more complicated than just gender. It is about what makes you invested enough to pick up the phone - it can be because you've always liked that celeb, because the judges are rude to them, because they made an error and seem to need support, etc, etc - hoards of emotional reasons beyond just the dancing. Viewers can fancy a celeb or identify with them or get invested in their story, etc.

I do think that if you really have a crush on a celeb you will vote more than if you just think their dancing is technically excellent. It makes you more intense in your support. That does give the young and the beautiful an advantage. (Plus of course if someone is beautiful they probably look better dancing.) So someone who inspires lust in the audience is likely to get more repeat votes - that's not to say everyone who votes for that person is lusting after them.

The big gender difference, imo, is that voters will forgive men for not being good at Latin much more than they'll forgive women. If a man looks really fantastic in ballroom hold and isn't actively embarrassing in Latin that's pretty much all he needs to be a good dancer for a lot of voters, where a woman celeb needs to be really good in both.

I would guess that the voting is low this year and that's why the results have been going with the leaderboard much more. If most viewers are saving their money and not voting at all, then smaller issues like fan bases will matter more.

Just want to post a comment made by Alli-F from the Non Appreciation Thread:

Not a busted fan, but I heard from radio 1 (which I normally don't, I am a classicfm fan, cross wires send my car radio to another station) and I heard a song sung by Charlie Simpson which I thought was quite good. I think it was called Down Down Down.

Edit to add: Thumbs up to jtnorth's comments above.

I think the short length of time the phone lines are actually open will have some bearing on that as well.

In the early days, the phone lines were re-opened immediately after the latest couple was eliminated, and were open all week. For about 99% of the time the phone lines were open you were voting either in retrospect or anticipation, depending on your point of view

I don't think you can discount the voting for Children in Need effect either for encouraging people to slip a couple of extra calls in.

Alesha was in the final 3 with 2 blokes and won. And the 3 female finalists you mentioned all had trips to the bottom 2 before the final 3, so their popularity was suspect.


Agree with all of the above, BIB aside (I wanted Tom to win, although I started out with Sarge & Kristina as my favourite couple)

At work the majority want Harry to win, which is why I've resigned myself to Chelsee finishing in second place. Harry has always been my second favourite anyway and I'll be fine with him winning. It's not like there's some great big prize on offer...

I agree with Miriam who posted earlier, a rival is a rival and what gender they are is utterly unimportant to me. As it happens, I've tended to prefer the person whose won over who they were competing against in every series.
The only one I really never took to was Tom Chambers, not because of him specifically but because I didn't really get invested in any of the competitors that year but I would personally have preferred Lisa to win as I thought she was the best dancer. However Tom won because of a fabulous showdance.


I also agree with this. I've never fancied anyone whose taken part in SCD (the competitors that is, I love Ian Waite however). I always vote on whichever person connects to me on an emotional level. I used to dance from the age of four into my teens and since then have been lucky enough to continue being involved in dance through my work as a journalist in reviewing a variety of dance and entertainment productions.
If someone connects with the love of dancing and then projects that onto the dance floor I will vote for them whether they get it perfectly right or not. I want to see the emotional love I have for dance reflected in the competitors taking part.

Duplicate.

Gethin went out in week 11 so it was only Alesha and Matt DA in the week 12 final.

That's not the point - the final 3 in that series were 2 males and 1 female, and the female was not eliminated before the 2 males. Whether or not all 3 were in the final isn't really relevant.

Last year neither Kara nor Matt Baker put up a fabulous showdance, but their supporters would rather die than not support them with votes in the Final.

Tom's fab showdance gave his legion of fans the perfect excuse to vote en masse. The previous Saturday Tom put up two poor efforts: the obligatory AT plus the optional jive (for goodness sake Camilla, choosing the Tom-unfriendly jive in an elimination crisis ). It was no kind of spectacular dance, and put Tom in a position of no escape in the dance-off.

In this hopeless situation Tom's fans regardless marched on Shepherds Bush with torches and pitchforks (actually making 2,000 hurried phonecalls complaining to BBC about Tess's misleading invitation "Vote and save your candidate").

Spectacular showdance in the Final was the trigger for action, but there had to be a mob sufficient, ready and willing to heed the trigger , as there had been the previous Saturday. Even with a spectacular showdance it was questionable if a determined mob would have voted for Rachbot.

Urm, if they're his legion of fans they don't NEED an excuse to vote so not sure what point you're trying to claim there?

Tom also was in the unfortunate position of having to be put through because there was no way he could be saved by the public vote.
Surely that then demonstrates perfectly that both female contestants had received enough public votes to marry with the way the judges' placed them on the leader board. It's difficult to say conclusively what might have happened that year without that fiasco.

Lisa Snowdon had public votes????????????

No, not really - with the judges scores tied for Lisa/Rachel giving them 3 each, meant that at that time of day, Tom only had one judges point (not 2 as happens now).

This led to him not being able to avoid the dance off, at all - even if he got the max 3 points from the public vote, he would only have a total score of 4. In that situation, the girl coming second on public vote would have a total of 5 and be safe, and the one coming bottom with the public vote would also have 4 - putting them in the dance off as well

So, whatever the public said Tom was in the dance off and the chances of him surviving against either Lisa or Rachel would be in the teeny tiny numbers

The tied judges scores for Lisa/Rachel was the real trouble - having Head-Judge-Len tie-break them would have worked just as well, but having one couple unable to avoid the dance off even by topping the public vote wasn't good.

Clearly as she reached the final.


Yes, that was the point of my comment, Tom couldn't be saved from the dance off and therefore was put through into the final so we have no idea of knowing how the voting would have gone that year without the voting fiasco.

Zoe/ Emma/ Lisa/ Rachel = didn't win because they were the judges' pets and had mistakes ignored by the panel where the other competitors - were clobbered in terms of comments and marks.....

Nothing to do with them being female - just overmarked/praised in relation to the others (it didn't matter that they may have been properly placed on the leaderboard so the marks themselves were irrelevant), and the GBPs sense of fair play kicked in!

Frally - Emma didn't make the final in her series - she was dumped out by the public in the semi - probably because of the fact that a dance off was introduced at the quarter final stage which allowed the judges to vote off Louisa (who had probably beaten Emma in the public vote)

The reason they had to amend the rules in Tom's series - which was being rigged for a Lisa/ Rachel final - was that the constant exhortation to vote to save your favourite from the dance off meant that people were wasting their money as there was no way that Tom COULD avoid it given the way the leaderboard marks were allocated.

At the end of the semi the marks were

Rachel 3
Lisa 3
Tom 1

The public vote was probably

Rachel 3 +2=5
Lisa 3+1=4(on the basis that Lisa had been in the dance off for weeks)
Tom 1+3=4

Tom and Lisa would have been in the dance off, and the judges would probably have voted Tom off - despite him topping the public vote
Without the dance off - Lisa would have gone on the premise that the public vote is the tie breaker, and the fact that she was dumped out of the final first despite a perfect 80 from the judges in an attempt to save her would seem to back the semi voting results above.

Its a reason why the judges shouldn't get another chance in the dance off..... if a celeb is clearly not getting the public vote, why keep them in when the public are responsible for half(+) of the final result? Save them once fine - but repeated saves must be embarrassing for the poor celeb who realises that they aren't liked (and similar on the X Factor - with the likes of Misha B/ Katie Waissel/ Cher Lloyd were repeatedly saved despite not getting the public votes!). As soon as the judges' ability to save goes - so do their pets!

Lisa reached the final because the judges repeatedly saved her in numerous dance offs.

To be in the bottom 2 as many times as she was despite high placings on the leaderboard she had to have been coming bottom in the votes

People will vote anyway. I know there may be some people out there who haven't decided who they're going to vote for, or whether they're going to vote, but I'd venture that these people aren't going to be the ones who vote many times.

Contrast that to the fans who spend the entire allocated voting period trying to get through - they probably end up voting about 50 times each.

Kara's performance in the final was rubbish. She spent the rumba trying not to cry after they showed that emotional VT of her talking about Artem, messed up her showdance doing the flip, and couldn't move her arm properly during her waltz and AS, not to mention being out her face on painkillers. Doesn't matter - she still won because the voters decided that she should win before the final even started.

Tom's showdance wasn't a turning point - that year, the judges marks in the final did actually count towards the outcome. With Lisa and Rachel tied on 3 points (again), the only way Tom was reaching the final two ahead of Lisa was if he was already topping the vote. Conversely, Rachel went in to the final with a number of bottom two appearances behind her. Tom, despite acheiving lower marks than Rachel in the weeks leading up to the final never ended up in the bottom two. Like Kara, he was always going to win because the support was there before the final even started.

Not necessarily the case at all, she could have come second to bottom in the public votes. Without the public voting figures being released it's impossible to say with any certainty.
The judges saved her because they wished to, they're as entitled to do that as the public was to vote for her or for any other candidate.
Joe Public not agreeing that she was as good a dancer as the judges doesn't make them right and the judges wrong or vice versa.

In the 3-3-1 semifinal had the dance-off proceeded there was no doubt the public would have voted bottom-scoring Tom top of 3 regardless of marks. But that would not have saved Tom because in the dance-off both contestants would have reprised their dances an hour earlier - with Tom scoring 10 marks lower. There was no way the judges could have contradicted their own marks an hour earlier and saved Tom.

My rhetorical remark about a Tom's showdance was that Tom's fans rationalised it as a respectable reason to support Tom. Had Tom put up an under-par showdance in the Final (as Kara and Matt did compared to their high standards), I believe the public would have voted for Tom regardless, but without justification and with gritted teeth.

That was the year of Rachbot, of Lisa who lived in the Bottom Two, and of resentment over judges manipulating marks via a forest of 10 paddles. Tom was regarded as untainted and the victim. Tom's scintillating showdance offered wonderful justification, but it was not the only reason for Tom's coronation.

Yes but none of that rationale has anything to do with him being a bloke and it being women voting.