Right, now we're all back online, week six of this will be coming up tomorrow (if we can all tear ourselves away from watching the Last of the Fan Wars on the main forum), and it's a.......... non-theme week, which is kind of disappointing.
Still, it features:

- Someone dancing to a song about their death!
- Dirty Dancing stoner party dance!
- Rapacious raccoons!

And this week's soundtrack includes Blondie, Elton John, Marvin Gaye, and something called Lucky Blondo! See you all tomorrow!

A song about their death. Nice.

Thumbs up for the raccoons though

OPENING CREDITS

*lights up... we hear the Strictly Band trying to sing in angelic harmony, but it sounds more like a 4-pets-for-1 special offer on neutering at the animal hospital*

Come with us on a journey through time and space...

*the judges hurtle through the time vortex on their Time Travelling flying piano, each of them steering in a different direction*

*the special effects are a bit Monty Python/French & Saunders, showing a little plastic piano with four Lego minifigures attached to it bobbing around the background on a piece of very visible string*

*the familiar Strictly themed strikes up, and the credits begin as usual with the shots of all the couples, and an onscreen calendar appears, the dates flicking back...*

1250 BC - Helen is puzzling over a giant wooden horse, when its backside opens and out jumps Giovanni Pernice! They pout down the camera, all sexy sexy sex.

Helen of Troy and Giovanni Pernice!

324 BC - Alexander is swinging his sword about (take that in whatever sense you like) while Kristina flexes her muscles at a safe distance.

Alexander the Great and Kristina Rihanoff!

1050 - Lady Macbeth stares down the camera grinning malevolently, hands soaked in blood, while Brendan is chased round the back of shot by some angry Scotsmen.

Lady Macbeth and Brendan Cole!

1878 - Sarah pops out of Nancy’s sacred glitter-coffin (and elbows Trent out of the way, he goes flying), finds the camera immediately and makes endless stage-school faces down it.

Sarah Bernhardt and Trent Whiddon!

1921 - Sigmund diagnoses Oti with Extreme Competitive Neurosis, she knocks his papers flying and leaps into his arms. Sigmund does sex-faces. Oti’s is a bona fide rictus grin.

Sigmund Freud and Oti Mabuse!

1955 - James is pouting and posing and adjusting his famous red jacket right down the camera lens, while Aliona gives him a note saying ‘MORE WOOBIE’

James Dean and Aliona Vilani!

1957 - Jack takes a cross-country road trip, but he looks very green-faced because Iveta’s driving, and she’s swerving everywhere and bellowing Lithuanian curses at pedestrians.

Jack Kerouac and Iveta Lukosiute!

1959 - Marilyn has a whoopsie-daisy skirt malfunction in a windy street. Pasha (a gentleman) tries to save her modesty, but ends up with a faceful of skirt. Marilyn cackles.

Marilyn Monroe and Pasha Kovalev!


Welcome to STRICTLY: Step Back In Time!


4 down, 8 to go!

WEEK 6

Lady Macbeth & Brendan Cole
Quickstep - Dreaming - Blondie
(9, 9, 9, 9) - 36
Channeling Debbie Harry’s cool New Wave allure into the Quickstep makes for something quite compelling instead of the usual peppy all-the-blue-Smarties runaround, and Lady M pulls it off with some panache. It also means that she and Brendan can co-exist on the same dancefloor without giving off stonking great waves of ‘I want to bury you alive in the woods and don’t test me because I’ve already dug the hole’. In short, she looks like she’s (to steal a line from another Blondie song) walking on imported air.

Jack Kerouac & Iveta Lukosiute
Samba - Sexual Healing (Rio Version) - Marvin Gaye
(6, 9, 8, 7) - 30
So there’s plenty of sex and a single-and-a-half-bounce, but Craig is really digging in hard on the performance face arc (just wait for the Charleston, as always, you know it’s coming) and says it’s just. not. good. enough. Tess says ‘Who needs to smile when you look like THIS?’ and digs her nails into Jack’s shoulder - and he looks like he wants to murder her on live TV. What’s even funnier is that Claudia says exactly the same thing one minute later, but this time he looks at her pityingly, like he just got propositioned by Dobby the house-elf (sorry for that image, I’ve been re-reading Harry Potter lately and it was the only thing that came to mind).

Alexander the Great & Kristina Rihanoff
Viennese Waltz - How Can You Mend A Broken Heart? - Al Green
(8, 9, 8, 8) - 33
The stars (and, more importantly, the judges) begin to align for Alexander after last week’s polarising effort. It’s mainly through a nice safe Viennese Waltz, where one only has to focus on the technique of spinning round and round and round again. And Alexander accomplishes this task quite handily, so let it be known that he’s got stamina, ladies AND gentlemen. He can even pivot! Craig drawls that AT LAAAAAST he’s showing some potential. Unfortunately we’re now officially over halfway, so this may have come a bit late.

Coming up next, Marilyn gets morbid, Sarah trips out, and Helen sends out an SOS...

Marilyn Monroe & Pasha Kovalev
Foxtrot - Candle in the Wind - Elton John
(8, 9, 9, 8) - 34
The trickster gods who run the music department have gone particularly tasteless this week, because we all know what this song’s about. As such, the technique goes to pieces and at times Marilyn is lolloping around the dancefloor like Pasha’s dragging around a particularly sticky mop. But still, the judges agree it’s understandably a bit weird to be dancing to a song dedicated to your death and so have no compunctions in overmarking her to safety (/the mid-leaderboard).

Sarah Bernhardt & Trent Whiddon
Cha-Cha-Cha - Love is Strange - Mickey & Sylvia
(9, 8, 8, 10) - 35
Well, this must be the most loopy-loo thing to ever spring from a Dirty Dancing album track. The track is punishingly slow for a Cha-Cha-Cha but miraculously these two mine something out of it, even if it’s utterly arcane and more reminiscent of a bunch of naked hippies burning incense and ambling around mumbling ‘free love, man’ on a hillside at the summer solstice (or, for Trent, on a Sunday afternoon). They also lip-sync that ‘SYLVIA! How you call ya loverboy’ ‘C’MERE LOVERBOY!’ bit from the middle. Craig and Bruno lap it up, while Karen and Alesha are mostly befuddled.

Helen of Troy & Giovanni Pernice
Jive - SOS - Rihanna
(7, 8, 9, 9) - 33
There are the faintest glimmers of some personality (or at least acting ability, either would be welcome) in there, but like Alexander, one wonders if this breakthrough is too little too late. It’s nothing breathtakingly original - peppy vanilla young woman does peppy vanilla jive - but it’s still entertaining. Their side-by-sides are rather nifty, and Helen has a hell of a lot of spring in her heels, and she has a giggle fit at the end: it’s almost like semi-mythical Helen of Troy is taking baby steps to being a real life girl.

To close the show, James is on the telephone and Sigmund discusses the sexual proclivity of the raccoon...

James Dean & Aliona Vilani
Samba - Jeu du Téléphone - Lucky Blondo
(9, 10, 9, 10) - 38
These two hit the samba and produce an almost serenely cool thrill ride across the floor set to some random piece of Europop I found on the Ab Fab Movie soundtrack (the same can be said about a lot of my routines, honestly), which means they top the leaderboard for the first time. It feels like the next stage in the evolution after their Cha-Cha-Cha, because it’s got the same easy atmosphere and natural hip action, double-bounces along and travels beautifully. Instead of critiquing it normally, Karen makes a series of sounds like a puppy being strangled, and Alesha breaks out the ‘YOU. WUZ. FIERCE.’

Sigmund Freud & Oti Mabuse
Charleston - Doin’ the Raccoon - André Popp
(3, 5, 5, 4) - 17
Sadly the wardrobe department has run out of their onesie budget for the series, so Sigmund can rest safe in the knowledge that he could have looked stupider. Even after declaring his familiarity with the Charleston, and proclaiming it to be the dance of sex, perfectly exemplified by the raccoon, well-known to be the most naturally sexually rapacious of all the animals. As a result, Oti has choreographed the whole routine out-of-hold, lift-free and on completely separate sides of the dancefloor.

And how does the leaderboard stack up? Let's have a butchers...

WEEK 6 LEADERBOARD

And now, it's back again, just like the plague! Let's Step Backstage In Time!

Very disappointed you didn't get Lady Di in to help Marilyn 'get into the spirit of the dance', only for it to descend into an argument over who really gets dibs on the song.

Maybe that's just me though.

Alexander feels very much like the 'dark horse' and is slowly, very gradually improving. Freud (/Oti) is a delight as ever.

BACKSTAGE PASS

After yet another week of criticism (/sledgehammer-subtle storylining) about his grumpy, grumpy face, Jack Kerouac heads straight to the bar (quelle surprise) to send several tumblers of whisky down the hatch in five minutes flat. Then he sees his erstwhile drinking buddy James Dean and proceeds to lay in to him for wearing almost the exact same woobie face every week for every dance but never getting picked up on it by the judges. Being markedly less than sober, Jack gets all up in his personal space to try and intimidate him, but soon realises this was a bad move:


Marilyn Monroe has had a weird week, and despite her only dipping three points, she’s slap bang in the middle of the leaderboard. As a result, the perfectionist who was always late to movie sets and got inside her own head begins to rear up. She sits on a chaise longue in the corner, staring off into the middle distance.
After being verbally body-slammed by Marilyn last week, Sarah Bernhardt has been preparing a foot-long list of scathing comebacks for the past seven days. However, on seeing her rival dejected, decides to scrap this and strike back by playing subtle mind games. However, she rather shoots herself in the foot, as she’s such a grande dame luvvie theatrical type that even her internal monologue is delivered like a Shakespeare soliloquy: i.e. loud enough for everyone to hear. In it, she compares herself to the subtle, cunning genius of Iago, and doubts Marilyn has even read Shakespeare, while Sarah claims to have played literally every character.

Despite her respectable second-place finish on the leaderboard and knowing that she’s safe already (thanks to her mole in the public vote department), Lady Macbeth is still uncharacteristically tense, reflecting back to Eleanor’s parting comment last week about her hands, and her eyes keep darting back and forth to check they’re clean.
She takes her tensions out on the others, and - knowing the bottom two - starts tightening the screws on Helen of Troy (who actually had a good week), murmuring about how everyone’s kind of over her now and how most people think she’s a skank.


Helen tries to ignore this, knowing that Lady M is playing mind games again, but just as the results come in, she can see Lady M’s Cheshire Cat grin widening across her face...

The bottom two is announced. The couples with the lowest combination of judges’ scores and public vote are...

Alexander the Great & Kristina Rihanoff v Helen of Troy & Giovanni Pernice

...and Helen, whose bottom lip has been quivering, breaks down fully and runs around the corridors backstage, screaming her head off like a broken fire alarm. Giovanni runs around after her, and whether he wants to calm her down ready for the dance off or he wants to fit in one last quick rutting session before they get shock-booted out is unclear.

Sigmund Freud has been analysing Alexander the Great even more now that his series-mother Eleanor’s gone, pointing out he’s had his highest score in the absence of the suffocating mother figure that Alexander is convinced that he needs. And for the first time, perhaps because he’s had to mature this week and stand on his own two feet without constant mollycoddling, Alexander takes this in and begins to stride around proudly and confidently and maybe just a bit too confidently...
...and he’s promptly called for the bottom two, he takes two grand steps back, and locks himself in the bathroom again.

This is the first really contentious dance off of the series, and it all comes down to who the judges are shamelessly lusting over (and it’s really an even split), and who is less of a visible basket case in the dance off. As such, Helen’s kicks and flicks go haywire (I initially wrote Laura then, aren’t Giovanni’s partners so distinguishable?), while Alexander mostly gets through intact, if a bit sea-sick.
And so the Giovanni Does Tinder trilogy comes to its messy end, and in the spirit of all trilogies, each episode was truly less worthwhile than the last.

SAVED: Alexander the Great & Kristina Rihanoff (Karen, Alesha)
ELIMINATED: Helen of Troy & Giovanni Pernice (Craig, Bruno) - eliminated on deadlock

As next week is Literature Week, here's an advance reading list (bear in mind, some songs may have only a tangential reference to the original work, mmmm-hmmm)


Don't worry, nobody's coming for Alison Hammond's sainted legacy yet (they're not dancing to the Kate Bush song, that is)

...just as I promptly drop him into the bottom two, good timing. Although, as we saw last night, being in the bottom two twice still doesn't rule you out of a win...

And I would've gotten Lady Di in, but I didn't want the Daily Mail/Daily Express to come for me on charges of blasphemy.

(Of course Alexander would land in the bottom two, just as I pin him as the dark horse!)

Another wonderful round. Marilyn Monroe the particularly sticky mop and Trent getting to... ride the donkey once more were particular highlights.

I hope whoever's got Wuthering Heights next week will still be accompanied by Alison Hammond flying down on a sofa, even if the legacy of that particular song is being left well alone. It's what the world needs right now.

The choreography for the Wuthering Heights dance is basically mad contemporary flailing and crazy, crazy lifts, so there's a risk of Alison getting knocked off her sofa. She'd probably cackle even harder at that.... *adds that scenario to next week*

Oh, and thank you both for commenting.

So my internet has been pretty awful the last couple of days, so I doubt I can upload the next week until at least Saturday, and if not then, the other side of Christmas. Hopefully it won't go too far into January 2017...

OPENING CREDITS

*lights up... we hear the Strictly Band trying to sing in angelic harmony, but it sounds more like a 4-pets-for-1 special offer on neutering at the animal hospital*

Come with us on a journey through time and space...

*the judges hurtle through the time vortex on their Time Travelling flying piano, each of them steering in a different direction*

*the special effects are a bit Monty Python/French & Saunders, showing a little plastic piano with four Lego minifigures attached to it bobbing around the background on a piece of very visible string*

*the familiar Strictly themed strikes up, and the credits begin as usual with the shots of all the couples, and an onscreen calendar appears, the dates flicking back...*


324 BC - Alexander is swinging his sword about (take that in whatever sense you like) while Kristina flexes her muscles at a safe distance.

Alexander the Great and Kristina Rihanoff!

1050 - Lady Macbeth stares down the camera grinning malevolently, hands soaked in blood, while Brendan is chased round the back of shot by some angry Scotsmen.

Lady Macbeth and Brendan Cole!

1878 - Sarah pops out of Nancy’s sacred glitter-coffin (and elbows Trent out of the way, he goes flying), finds the camera immediately and makes endless stage-school faces down it.

Sarah Bernhardt and Trent Whiddon!

1921 - Sigmund diagnoses Oti with Extreme Competitive Neurosis, she knocks his papers flying and leaps into his arms. Sigmund does sex-faces. Oti’s is a bona fide rictus grin.

Sigmund Freud and Oti Mabuse!

1955 - James is pouting and posing and adjusting his famous red jacket right down the camera lens, while Aliona gives him a note saying ‘MORE WOOBIE’

James Dean and Aliona Vilani!

1957 - Jack takes a cross-country road trip, but he looks very green-faced because Iveta’s driving, and she’s swerving everywhere and bellowing Lithuanian curses at pedestrians.

Jack Kerouac and Iveta Lukosiute!

1959 - Marilyn has a whoopsie-daisy skirt malfunction in a windy street. Pasha (a gentleman) tries to save her modesty, but ends up with a faceful of skirt. Marilyn cackles.

Marilyn Monroe and Pasha Kovalev!


Welcome to STRICTLY: Step Back In Time!


5 down, 7 to go!

WEEK 7
Literature Week

Marilyn Monroe & Pasha Kovalev
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Rumba - The Ghost of Tom Joad - Bruce Springsteen
(8, 8, 8, 9) - 33
Another week in Marilyn’s mid-series funk, as her Depression-themed Rumba (set in the dustbowl) goes awry. The first half is okay, but one misstep (again, onto Pasha’s foot) means the second half collapses in on itself like a sinkhole opened up on the dancefloor. She’s clearly inwardly cursing and beating herself up during the (very, very sugar-coated) judges’ comments. Sultry and suggestive is meant to be Marilyn’s bag, culturally speaking, so it’s odd to see her sliding into muttering-to-oneself-in-a-dark-room self-sabotage mode.

Sigmund Freud & Oti Mabuse
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
Paso Doble - Are ‘Friends’ Electric? - Gary Numan
(2, 5, 4, 4) - 15
Gary Numan wrote this song to describe the alienation he felt from others, and there’s truly no more alienating celebrity/pairing/Strictly-journey than this one. Oti is probably the best link to the novel, as I’m not entirely sure if she’s replaced herself with an android double (in homage to Helen, so cruelly booted out last week) and swanned off to a tropical beach paradise. Sigmund does his best to embody the matador, but he gets regularly tangled in his cape and has not one solitary clue what he’s doing most of the time.

Lady Macbeth & Brendan Cole
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Waltz - Into the West - Annie Lennox
(8, 8, 9, 8) - 33
Sadly, they haven’t forced them into fake hairy hobbit feet. Lady M is mystical old Galadriel, in her flowing white robes (and the elf ears that she so transparently hates), and Brendan is... Aragorn? (You can’t throw a shoulder-length wig on any random pro and call it a costume) Lady M enchants Brendan to come join her in the West, the journey that’s one big ol’ death metaphor (before presumably pushing him off the boat and holding him down with an oar, because that’s how the good Lady M rolls). It’s nice, if a bit grim-faced and cringing, but it’s a non-week 1 waltz, what is there to say?

Alexander the Great & Kristina Rihanoff
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Charleston - A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got) - Fergie ft. Q-Tip & GoonRock
(5, 8, 7, 7) - 27
In one sense Alexander plays the character of Jay Gatsby to perfection, because (much like the novel) although it’s his party it takes him ages to show up, and even then he spends a load of time faffing around in the background while we watch the Kristina Show. When he does decide to join her (and of course he must join her, who else is going to throw her around like a boomerang?), it’s full of jazz hands and some light facial contortion, but as Craig points out, he swivels like he’s wearing shoes made of titanium.

James Dean & Aliona Vilani
Paradise Lost - John Milton
Argentine Tango - Red Right Hand - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
(9, 10, 10, 10) - 39
James and Aliona turn the heat up even further after last week and launch into the mythical, with stunning results. It’s fair to say it’s epic, torn between heaven and hell, angels and demons, and it’s almost frighteningly intense, flames erupting everywhere. The ganchos are tight enough to hack each other’s legs off, the lifts have no respect for life and limb, and they’re smouldering enough that you don’t know whether they’re going to go down on each other or spontaneously combust. Thank goodness Tess is here to ease the tension by goggling and yakking on like ‘COOO WASN’T THAT HOT LADIES AND GENTLEMEN’. James then turns the heat back on again by responding to Bruno’s usual sex-crazed yammering by full-on snogging his face off. He was getting a 10 anyway, but I admire the commitment to buying one’s marks.

Jack Kerouac & Iveta Lukosiute
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Quickstep - Basket Case - Green Day
(9, 10, 9, 9) - 37
Jack’s arc through Strictly is truly an experiment in how many light-hearted and squeaky clean dances he can corrupt with his brand of mid-century misanthropy (or, if you think that’s a bit pretentious, his grumpy grumpy face). Everything is technically in place - the man can jeté, people, over and over again (he’s certainly got stamina, eyyyy - and yes, that’s the second week in a row I’ve made that joke about one of the men) - and while the other judges might carp on about that stony old face, Karen is flooding her basement weekly for him, and so has no such qualms in giving him his first 10.

Sarah Bernhardt & Trent Whiddon
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
American Smooth - It’s All Coming Back To Me Now - Céline Dion
(9, 10, 9, 10) - 38
(This song was inspired by the novel, mkay? It’s a chuffing great song too) Rather than face off directly with the Mighty Hammond in a battle of Cathy-based Smooths, Sarah and Trent go for Dion-based wild wafting and histrionics. Sarah spends the dance hyper-extending and flailing and climaxing (only her face, mercifully) and throwing herself bodily at Trent and expecting him to catch her (he’s such a poor slight little thing). It’s more contemporumba showdance than strict American Smooth, but it’s worth it to see somebody out-melodrama Céline Dion.

And with that, all seven couples have danced, so how does our literary leaderboard stack up tonight?

LITERATURE WEEK LEADERBOARD

And now it's time to once again go gently into that brave new world, that bleak house, that chamber of secrets that is STRICTLY: Step Backstage In Time!

BACKSTAGE PASS

As everybody retreats backstage, Marilyn Monroe - who has had a second consecutive off-week - speeds ahead of everyone else and locks herself in (and everybody else out) of the bar. While Sarah Bernhardt (the Joan Crawford to her Bette Davis) chortles away quietly, Marilyn goes on an over-perfectionist, self-destructive bender, necking all the vodka, trying to fondle all the waiters, and kicking the furniture around. It all culminates with her putting Candle in the Wind on the jukebox on an infinite loop and having premonitions of her death, gibbering and ugly-crying all the way.
Everyone else is stranded outside, and although they hammer on the door for a while, they eventually wander off to find something better to do. All except for Jack Kerouac, that is, who by now has a serious drinking problem and WILL NOT be parted with his beloved bar. After trying to rip the whole door off, he eventually resorts to pawing at the door and listening enviously to how drunk Marilyn is getting on the other side.

James Dean continues in his mission to sleep with as many members of this cast as possible, as he ensures he gets seven minutes of heaven with Alexander the Great in the props cupboard. This is all under the pretext of teaching him ‘all about Gatsby’ and ‘the true ethos of the Roaring Twenties’ (a.k.a. decadence and libertinism and free love, nudge nudge). They get through several bases, but then a runner who drew the short straw and had to interrupt them tells them the results are in. Alexander takes a deep breath in...

The bottom two is announced. The couples with the lowest combination of judges’ scores and public vote are...

Lady Macbeth & Brendan Cole v Sigmund Freud & Oti Mabuse

...and Alexander breathes out again in relief, and the two of them pick up from where they left off.

This week Sigmund Freud’s therapy couch plays host to the unique psychological landscape of Sarah Bernhardt, and it all goes belly-up. He tries to analyse her and suggest that, as a compulsive liar and inveterate fantasist, maybe she has a problem but she’s having none of it. Knowing that he’s definitely a goner, she goes IN on him, calling him a creepy little pervert who’s disgracing the competition with his utterly rancid sordidness. Jack Kerouac joins in too, as he’s very ratty since he’s been denied a drink, and calls him a wretched little weirdo. Lady Macbeth also joins in - amazed that people are fighting without her having to start it - because this is fun, and berating people is how she gets her rocks off.
Even Marilyn starts swearing at him through the door, and by now they can hear her throwing glasses around, so all of them (including Jack) decide to barricade the door with all the available furniture and let Pasha pick her up again in the morning.

SAVED: Lady Macbeth & Brendan Cole (Craig, Karen, Alesha, Bruno)
ELIMINATED: Sigmund Freud & Oti Mabuse

I'm so blessed to live in a world where Strictly Come Dancing Alexander the Great/James Dean slash fiction is a thing that exists.

While I was writing it, I did wonder '...wait, what am I writing?' But, you know, the showmance is an important part of the Strictly experience... (and thank you)

I bet Oti's quite glad to be eliminated and not have to dance with that freak again

I like Sarah, hope she wins.

Ah, thank you for commenting - I'm glad someone's taken to Sarah, she's a real character. Probably very marmite, but a character nonetheless.