Originally Posted by Veri:
“I take the point that the alternative to a dull lift can be nothing that's at all interesting, and that the male celebs lift the female pros. But I still think DOI puts too much emphasis on lifts.
Perhaps the problem is that skating is too hard and lifts too easy.
Some lifts are difficult and represent significant accomplishments, but I don't think DOI has ever done a good job of making that clear or of explaining the skills and abilities involved. Meanwhile, viewers can see that almost all the celebs, both male and female, seem to finding skating difficult and struggle to do even something like a simple spin (in some cases even to skate on their own), but all the women can be lifted. Lifts therefore seem an easy option. It's clear that some lifts are dangerous and that some require strength, but I don't think it seems to viewers like they need as much skill as skating.
This works against female contestants in two ways. First, they're the ones being lifted, which seems easier than skating; second, they have to spend a lot of time practising the lifts, and that is time not spent improving their skating. Meanwhile, the men can work on their skating even while they're practising lifting.
The emphasis on lifts is to make the show more "spectacular", not to give all the female celebs the routines that would be best for them. Meanwhile, the lifts have less and less spectacular effect on viewers, because they've seen it all before. And when a different sort of lift comes along, such as Jessica's candle lift in "Mercy" in the 2009 series, it tends to be undervalued because it's not one of the "spectacular" ones the show has been treating as the most worthy.
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In Virtue and Moir's routines, such as the beautiful dance you linked, only a small proportion of the routine is devoted to lifts. I wonder what DOI would have been like, and if it would have worked better, if it had been aimed more at ice dancing and less at pair skating and Adagio.
It seems odd to call a show "Dancing on Ice" and build it around famous ice dancers Torvill and Dean, and then focus so much on lifts; and I think that most, at least, of the best and most memorable routines from female DOI contestants relied on good skating (good by DOI standards) and weren't focused too much on lifts. I don't think Suzanne Shaw would have won if it hadn't been for one of the judges saying she was doing too many lifts and not enough skating.
Re "Suzanne and Clare were probably best provided for - with routines that allowed them to do a variety of moves, dance, and progress building moves into more difficult and exciting ones over the weeks", I would say that Suzanne was in trouble because of too many lifts before one of the judges pointed that out, and that I think Jessica Taylor had some of the best variety in her routines. I think she's under-appreciated, underrated; and I'm disappointed that she's not among the "all stars".”
I think the problem with more dancing is that for that you do need someone to choregraph a story, to the right music, well - and people to act it. The ice dance pros will have a choregrapher working up one good routine or two for each dance needed at all that years performances. T and T don't manage that very often (once or twice a series on average?) Even if they could produce better routines, the non actors and dancers would look pointless if they did try and perform them. There's also a time constraint as the routines seem now to be shorter (didn't we work out some timings a few years ago and prove that?) , and were always shorter than a professional routine. That may be a price for putting in more celebs, to fill more weeks and allow more adverts (rather like Big Brother) It means you either have even fewer lifts than the pros do, or you put the lifts in, to keep the same number of spectacular moves, and have not much time for anything else. Glad you liked the Olympics ice dance - to be honest, though, i picked that routine because its the free dance and has more exciting things going on in it. They are good in their other 2 dances too - but I thought those were a bit unexciting visually for TV use. You really need a great theme and music (Jai Ho, Riverdance, Music, or even 9 to 5) that lends itself to a routine to make a big impact on TV. And its no coincidence that those were all danced by actors - two at least with dance training. I think the audience would really like to see someone doing what a Radianova, or the pairs skaters do - or a bit of it - but, as I said, I can't think of more than a very few celebs who have done that sort of move at all on the show - all but two are in the all stars series though.
I agree the programme is up against a brickwall - as any move done once then has less impact the second time its seen. This doesn't seem a problem elsewhere though - the X factor survives on similar singers, and winners, and Splash seems to consist of humans just falling into water 60% of the time every week.
