The Mirror is slamming it, but the Sun isn't - in fact the tweets they have printed are positive.

I happen to agree with the Mirror, though.

How gutted must be Will Young appearing a celeb whilst Olly Murs performs his new single

So Rinder has been learning Russian and gets the new Russian dancer, suspicious.

I don't often agree with the Mirror but I do on this occasion. It took 10 minutes to get to the start. Whoever thought of that intro needs sacking.

I think he meant he'd been learning in the last 20 or so minutes

Nooooo he meant he learnt hello in russian
whilst walking up the stairs -

She's actually Ukranian, but when the show wants to force a storyline, I don't think it matters to them! He actually made several other comments about wanting someone Russian beforehand which were cut out, so they're definitely pushing that angle...

Just watched the group dance again, actually Greg seems not too bad at least he can move his hips. I definitely think there was a swap with Brendan/Giovanni/Laura/Anastasia. She is almost taller than Giovanni and i know it makes no odds but she was Brendans partner in the group dance. There was a quite a number of them who seemed ok compared to other season openers. Will is carrying a bit of weight surprisingly or maybe it was the blue shirt he had on!

Can I just re: the swap thing that Aliona hardly danced at all with Jay in their group dance, he was mainly with Kristina and Ola and Aliona was mainly with Peter.

Stig, it would be interesting to know how the tv show measured up against the live performance?

I don't think so - Will's guested at least twice before promoting his new singles including last year too. Danced a bit as well

It's very condensed down and obviously a little slicker than in reality, but it still looks like a very fun experience on TV (as it did in person!). It's interesting to see how they take the raw, not very glamorous stuff - they had a bit of trouble getting the opening dance in front of the curtain right, for example - and turn it into a big production, glitzy TV show. I didn't realise how much of the interviews they cut out, either!

He looked amazing with Aliona *sobs

There are 17 professionals and 15 celebs. It was known that 2 pros would not have partners - Neil Jones (husband & partner of Katya) and Chloe who is dance partner of AJ Pritchard.

Last year Joanne didn't have a celeb but was still involved with the show, and Neil has been doing a lot of the choreography for the pro routines for the past couple of series, so I'm sure he and Chloe will get plenty of dance opportunity.

Someone mentioned above that Neil does a terrific rumba! Actually he does all terrific Latin dances - he and Katya are UK's top professional Latin couple.

Hi Stig I thought the same at the Halloween show last year.

Just out of interest how many takes did Jay and Aliona do? They both sounded exhausted at the end, and how come they had so many?

Thank you. I've been to ITV studios at different times to be part of shows that are meant to be "live" - they are not! Even the presenter, who had been doing the show for yonks, had to repeat her introduction about 8 times before they were satisfied with the recording.

Claudia is increasingly irritating and spoils the show for me. It's as though she thinks it's the 'Claudia is 10 years old again show.'

Not at all. Very sensible, I'd say.
He mentioned, months ago, that he was learning Russian. Her English doesn't sound great so what a good idea to pair them.
You have such a suspicious mind. 😋

I wasn't over impressed with the "rocket" intro. The concept was good, but it didn't quite work.

Other than that, I thought it was a pretty good show. The celebs seem to be a lively bunch, which is always good for the show, and overall I thought the pairings were pretty much spot on.

So much padding in this show (and I'm not referring to the costumes ). Why on earth don't they just get on with it?
And why have singers on? Just get on with the dancing?

The woman is from the Ukraine but thankfully speaks English and probably didn't have to learn Russian at school after the USSR collapsed.

The singers were a waste of time, I say "singers" but the first one couldn't sing. That apparently doesn't matter these days.

It was recorded a couple of days ago, and Rebecca Ferguson was dire. Another XF person going nowhere. I liked Olly though, he always has catchy tunes

Any link on you tube to the group dance?

They did two takes for camera angles etc, but they had to wait around on the floor for a while beforehand as the production team set up technical bits and bobs.