in September, you are a pro-dancer (oh if only to have that sort of body!), and you have been assigned your "celeb".

You have a vague idea from early group dances what their skill set might turn out to be, but no idea if you as a partnership will work, if the public will like them, you or both and more importantly which dances will suit or not.

So you are asked to choose music at this time from a selection (which I believe that they are or at least are given some input by the producers within a theme perhaps).

So you if you imagine your celeb has say week 9 or 10 in them do you arrange their story arc to peak at say Blackpool for example were such a thing possible. Do you save their less flattering music/dances until after you think they will be long gone and back in their day jobs? Or do you get them out of the way early and risk elimination on an unsuitable dance?

Perhaps the only thing that happens when people get the wrong/worst choice song or dance is that they've done a bit better than anticipated and are still in the competition, because it's all guess-work and the production team have to know in advance what sort of music they are going to be asking the orchestra to work on, otherwise there would be frantic emails and band practice sessions every week in their hurry to arrange whatever music the pro or celeb have asked for.

It's a bit of a non-conspiracy theory I know, but I'm just saying it's a possibility.

Give me a non conspiracy theory to a conspiracy theory any day Lesley.

Actually if I interpret it correctly you are musing on the strategy. How should the pros (who lets be clear are all competitive and want to win) plan the campaign to maximise their chances? And particularly as we know the best dancer doesn't always win - Austin woz robbed (obviously )so it seems having a strategic plan is worth doing if they get any control over the order of dances etc.

Its a good question and one I don't think I have seen on here before. I have no answers though.

The pro dancers will work out very quickly the potential of their assigned celebs. They will then try to make EVERY week their best week, because they will know that every week can be their last. Sometimes their best will not be good enough, either because it doesn't suit their celeb (such as cha cha didn't suit Susanna) or doesn't appeal to the judges (as with Ashley this weekend) or the viewers.

I would have thought it would be a good plan to get dances you don't think your celeb will be good at out of the way early, while there are plenty of duffers still around to beat in the DO, if it comes to that.

Of course if you actually have one of the duffers, then your strategy needs to incline more to the lovable/comedy route (see Anton or Kristina for pointers)

Yes to a certain extent you can get ropier dances through earlier, but you can't be too careful can you? A wrongly placed rumba or salsa and you could have over-played your hand early on?

You also need to set up your celeb to be believed in, Sophie's Charleston set up our expectations early on and then had a dip. If they'd planned for that dance later in the series, would she have been there for us to enjoy it as we wouldn't have bought into her story with other dances that perhaps didn't suit her?

Also how do you know whether your celeb will spark into life on the dance floor week 1, because I'm pretty sure that their dances are prescribed through the whole series at the beginning. Who knew that Mark would charm us and stay in so long, longer than Rachel who didn't really wow the viewing public, but on paper should have been a "contender".