Last night dancing and the Judges comments took a little over 35 minutes in total out of an hour and three-quarter show.

The rest of the time was taken by the usual Brucie rambling, the increasingly annoying rambling from Tess, irrelevant 'In training' clips, and never let us forget the asinine puerile VT inserts.

Whatever next? Victoria's Velodrome Veleta?

We have all of this useless padding but then we get Judge's comments either cut off by Bruce or omitted altogether.


Come on - SCD producers. Try watching your own show and see how it is losing its way week by week.

You're perfectly entitled to your opinion, but this is just rubbish. Last night's show was the most watched programme of the week so far by a huge margin. It clearly isn't losing its way.

I agree with OP. I'll still watch it but the padding is pants.

Padded pants. Yuk.

Over 9.7 million.

I think you can find Veleta next to the Cambozola in Waitrose but it smells like another kind of insert.

Why not record it and skip the bits you don't want to see? I usually don't start watching until 7pm!

I'm not bothered about seeing the "last week's dance" recap and if it looks like something funny has happened in training I can rewind and watch it.

I skip what I don't want to see, and still manage to catch up before the start of Merlin.

lets see now maybe if all this padding disappeared it would still be the most watched show on Saturday and attract 15 million viewers but then we will never know since the suits will never listen to us mere mortals !!!!!!!!

I record it then start watching it in delay after about 40 minutes. I can then fast forward through the padding and replay any dances I really liked. Job done.

Edit. Just spotted celfyddydau's post. Snap.

You're never going to get rid of all the padding. The floor managers need time to set the stage for each couples' dance - hence the training/comedy VTs - and the adjudicators need time to check that the scoring equipment has worked properly so that the judges' spoken score / paddles /screen graphics all match - hence Tess's post-dance interviews with the couples.

Producing a live show and making it look seamless is similar to the swan analogy of sailing serenely on the surface while the legs are frantically paddling below, and from that perspective I think the BBC do a decent job of showing the sailing without the paddling. You might not always enjoy the content of the padding but there has to be something (the BBC is never going to televise scenery being dragged about or people fiddling with scoring equipment on their Saturday evening flagship show) and it has to be relevant to the program me.

Spot on! TBH I think pure dancing with no padding would not make a successful programme. Just need to curtail Bruce's ramblings!

Watch X factor instead, no padding in that.

Not much in the way of entertainment either. (IMO, YMMV, yadda yadda yadda)

Ah yes, the X Factor blandathon.