WHAT! They cannot be serious.

How about Anita Really Amateur. No 'Istory

Totally unappreciating the Amazon email I had this morning asking if I might be interested in something from their 'home and kitchen store' and then presenting me with 10 links relating to Peter Andre!!!!!!!! Including 'life sized cutout real stand up', 'novelty clock' and 'celebrity face mask'!!!!!

What have I done to deserve this? I'm a bookworm .. don't they know I'm usually looking up Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde!??!!!
I blame it on you mischievous lot!! I bet I've clicked on one of your insidious Andre links without realising it and that's it now .. It's written in stone as far as Amazon are concerned. They will flash it at me at every given opportunity!

For a few days he was all over my Amazon page when I clicked on it, down to this bliddy thread and following a link on it. How on earth I can browse for stuff by various authors regularly (A R Wise, you are a god at comedy/horror/zombie books ) and they never come up on my front page, but I follow one bloody link and that orange, gimlet eye fizog is looming at me for days

It's precisely because she's the only NDB left that that excuse can be used. Other years when there's more than one NDB left the excuse isn't valid. There's a whiff of Funnity here - sell it on the performance, actual technique and dodgy choreography aside. (She's much preferable to Funnity, needless to say!)

Ah, Helen. Her point was made so delicately and precisely, just like her.

I was playing Scrabble on my tablet this morning (it has a short ad between each go) and one ad had a page full of Andre's face! (was going to say ugly mug!). I don't even know what he was advertising - my fingers have never moved so fast!

Hi copper top

If your relative is being harassed - doorstepping is bang out of order - I would suggest contacting the head office of the charity directly, insisting you/ she speaks to the head of fundraising (it might have more weight if it is an angry relative) , and explaining to them that she is being harassed, that after years of support she will no longer be supporting the charity because of their lack of respect for her privacy, and that you/ she insist that her name is taken off all of their mailing/ subscribers lists. I would also ask for the named contact who is going to be dealing with this, their email address etc, and ask for it to be confirmed in writing when this has been done. You could make the final point that if this is not done, then you will be reporting the charity to the charities commission, as most charities are extremely wary of coming under their scrutiny for the wrong reasons. Failing that, I'd support Shep's suggestion of threatening or indeed contacting the daily fail. It's a really tough climate out there for fundraising, and no charity will want to run the risk of public censure. Twitter could be another option: # has anyone else been harassed by x charity?

As for Helen, I so share your pain. She was a beautiful, classy, elegant ballroom dancer who really committed to every dance, no matter how much she struggled. I also appreciated her slightly diffident, highly strung personality, with the bursts of humour she and Aljaz shared. So not her time to go. She would have been a worthy runner up. Equally sick of ANDB. Surely it makes more sense in marketing terms to focus on her positives - fearlessness, commitment, performance - rather than something that points directly back as an excuse for her technical weaknesses?

Nods in agreement. I had quite a rant about that last night.....

I am so relieved I've turned my JavaScript off on my iPad (stops it crashing) so I don't get any adverts 😂 Trouble is I can't multiquote or use DS smilies 😢

Also, I find all of her dancing has one note, there's no light and shade in her performances. Everything, even the rumba or the waltz, were quite aggressively performed. If you turned the sound off, I'd struggle to name the dance on any dance she's done except maybe the rumba and that's mostly the dress.

You could sit me in a room for hours and I would struggle to guess that that was an Argentine Tango.

Regardless of how much you like Jay or Georgia, their dancing and the choreography marks them out as the dance they are doing. Jay's salsa was obviously a salsa, Georgia's samba was obviously a samba.

The only ones where I'd struggle are Kellie and Kevin and Gleb and Anita. I'd never have guessed that the Oliver dance was a VW, I'd have guessed AS but couldn't name the base dance and funnily, it's the two pros who value performance over technique 🙄

You can complain to the charities involved on her behalf. If you aren't happy with the response you get then you can refer the matter to the regulator. Here's a link to the Government guidance

I did some work for a charity earlier this year and there's a lot of concern about harassment of donors. Reputable charities actively encourage complaints about over-enthusiastic fundraising as it can be extremely detrimental to their reputations. I would definitely start the complaints process if I were you.

I think that's because she's being taught routines, not how to dance, so is treating is like a puzzle to be solved, rather than something to be enjoyed. I don't think you can communicate the joy of a dance to the viewer if you're not getting any from it, however much gurning goes on.

I stick by my thought that Gleb has let her down badly, even if she lifts the glitter ball, with someone else she might not have got as far, but she might well have enjoyed it a lot more and really learned something.

RE all the charities advise, see I knew you clever people would have some ideas, thank you one and all. ❤️

The annoying thing is the very worse appear to be the most " respectable " just to name and shame in here

RNLI , British Heart Foundation, Macmillan, Cancer Research ( they are the one who door steeped her )

Off to write letters and emails, phone cajole and threaten , sighs how unnecessary !

Good luck, Coppertop.


Completely agree.
Gleb lucked out with Anita, but I'm not sure it's the other way around.

I thought watching her dance on Saturday, that the music is incidental. The dance is overlayed the music but doesn't flow through it or from it. It could be anything playing in the background and the dance would look the same - which I think follows on from Alli's point.

Really good luck with that, thankfully never doorstepped, but before I registered them on TPS the amount of cold callers, including some from charities, my Mum and Dad got was awful. If I went round after work they could easily received 7 or 8 in the couple of hours I was there. TPS (which I know won't make a difference in your case) worked wonders thank god.

Me too! Makes me groan every time. And I am no Doc Marten-wearing/outdoorsy type either.

Actually- I do have some DMs, but I don't wear them with floral skirts and beanies...


Apologies if this has already been asked & answered many times before- but how much dance background does Katie have? I've been putting put her in the same bracket as Anita; is that wrong?

From memory, which may be completely wrong Katie had some ballet lessons as a child, but I don't think it could really be counted as training - struck me it was more a Saturday morning type thing, similar to Jay's tap lessons.

Yeah I vaguely remember saying she did ballet for a bit as a child but she was more interested in playing the piano. So she did a bit of kids ballet over 30 years ago May be nearer 40 depending how old she was. I did Jazz & Contemporary dance for a couple of years as a kid and can tell you I am no dancer!! I didn't want to do it and just lept about for a couple of hours every week, was fun but can't remember any of the dance

I wanted to be a train driver (female by the way - Fred is the dog's name )

Never, ever wanted to be a Disney princess - soppy bunch of women

Thanks. I thought so. I just wondered if I'd missed something that allowed the interminable "Anita has no dance training" saga, thereby implying that all the others did. I'd equate Katie's with near-as-dammit "no dance training" then.

I am a fan of Anita's, but even I am wearied of that storyline. She has so much more going for her- her intelligence, feistiness, straight-forwardness. I do wish there was just a little more nuance to the show- given that it's pretty much accepted that it's not just a dance contest, then they should go some way to letting the casual viewer know a bit more about the personalities other than the medium of VTs and the Clauditorium interview.

Unappreciating the total lack of subtlety on SCD. I know, I know, someone quite rightly pointed out to me that SCD is about as subtle as a brick, but the sheer number of people who can't seem to understand facial expressions unless they border on grimaces, nuances of movement during dances and as for body language - oh dear oh dear.
I find it extremely off-putting having everything repeated ad nauseam, in-your-face or constantly rammed down my throat and atm ANDB sadly is the one in the limelight - I really take to her as a person (as I'm a country dweller) but this is driving me off the drink (yes, I know, very strange)...

Strictly is very stereotypical in its own little way, though. Any female classed as 'elegant' which Katie is - is deemed automatically to have at least some ballet training in the background. Anita is slotted into the 'tomboy' section of the Strictly contestant pigeon hole and so has No Dance Background. Not so much as a white sergeant dashed. Ever.

No account is taken for day-job transferrable skills - be they dance related or not. (I always remember Len being amazed at Darren Gough's balance and co-ordination and wanting to shout at the tele 'you know what he actually does - imagine that without balance and co-ordination').

It's a pantomime written in crayon.

Well subtlety is something that can't be seen in a "normal" ballroom setting. Expressions are over the top cos no-one is up your face with a camera. Same with singing, many classicl singers do awful over the top facial expressions cos in a recital/concert room setting the only way for the audience to see your expressions, but on tv looks ridiculous. Yes the pros could adjust, some do, but hard to do when you've been dancing with these expressions for decades.

That's it exactly! By a four-year-old who thinks bodily function jokes are the best thing ever...