There is absolutely no tension in the 'dance off' because everyone knows that the judges are not judging the dance but 'potential', so they are going to stick with their original judgement.

John Barnes has been in the 'dance off' twice because of low public support - not least in my opinion because the GBP think the judges have overmarked him but you could see on Dominic ( and Lilia's) face as soon as the final two were announced that they knew they were going. Why keep up the humiliation of a dance off which is supposed to be a chance to save yourself? It is a farce.

Claudia - if you are reading this - can you pls get a BBC director to answer this question on ITT pls? We the audience are not happy - and it isn't just whinging, I accepted the changes at the beginning (although I was cynical about the motives) but I now cannot see what extra the dance off gives? Why not just work up to the final vote? If you wanted to add extra tension, let me assure you - you haven't!

I'm not THAT fussed about judges vs public in terms of who votes between the bottom two - it seems both can make the weirdest decisions - but I agree that the judges seem often to make their decisions based on things just as spurious as the GBP.

its not at al clear that the best dancer does win in the end or we wouldn't have had the last two finals. Colin , Zoe, Louisa, Emma were all beaten by hunky males with a so called journey story - actually the same story retold three times. Its just not obvious that the best people made the final or won either year. Matt was pretty undeniably nothing like as good overall as Louisa or Emma and in the final could only perform one style of dance well but not the other. If stronger males hadn't gone out early in bizarre public votes its not even clear that the two best males with the two best stories reached that final.

The problem with subjective voting is that some of the public vote on anything they fancy regardless of the dancing, the story shown on TV, other stories or any facts. Its not at all clear to me that Matt could beat Emma or Louisa on any combination of showmanship, skill, personality or performance that wasn't essentially based on personality. If the outcome of teh show is going to be determined by appeal they might as well stop the show in week one and ask people to vote on whatever grounds they are deciding on then. Objectively its got nothing to do with overcoming problems, having energy, difficulty level mastered, relative effort put in or relative progress either On those criteria the only way to score Matt over Louisa would be to assume that progress from poor to sometimes good was more valuable than that from good to sometimes very good. Subjective voting is more subjective than that - at least on SCD - when it happens it happens for some other reason.

The best the show can do is to try and get the best dancers to the end and then let the public pick which dancer or story they prefer. For the judges, celebs and pros sake the show needs to try and produce a credible winner which means one who doesn't lose their opposition early on through bizarre votes or in the SF because the voters voted out two of the three best dancers.

That I presume is the intention this year - essentially to avoid an incredible final like last years where the judges spent half their time noting how bad things were. It would look even more incredible this year when there are clearly more very good dancers in there who would undermine the credibility of the final if they were not there. . The public will still get the final choice but the best dancers will also get there. Its already gone wrong though because, just as Ray and Spooney may well have been better than Matt or Mark last year and progressed more , Gabby might well have been in competition this year.

I noticed this year that phone lines are open to ALL acts from the beginning, even before you've even seen them take their turn to dance.
I guess it's to give everyone equal time, but what's the point of voting for someone before you've even seen them dance ?

Well, Series 1 and 2, the best dancers clearly won.

Series 3 - yes, Colin was robbed by The Doll Dance.

Series 4 - mmm... maybe, I don't think it was so clearcut. Louisa and Emma weren't clearly that much better than Mark to my eyes, although I agree they were better than Matt.

But every dance competition is like that - everyone always second-guesses the judges.


That's why it's called democracy.

FWIW, I think the public are much better than they were in Series 1 or 2. Remember Chris Parker and Julian Cleary?

Yup - and as soon as you throw half the vote open to a (largely) uneducated public in terms of dance, it ceases to be entirely a dance competition. It IS a dance competition, and it irritates me when people totally ignore the dancing (as DJ says - Chris Parker, case in point! We do seem to have got past that stage, at least!), after all, it's called "Strictly Come Dancing", not "Strictly Come Personality", but if it was truly and purely a dance competition then you wouldn't need (or indeed need!) a phone vote, judges' comments probably (you'd just have the scores), training footage, ITT, and so on ad nauseum.

However much they are trying to educate people in what the dances should be like, there will always be differences of opinion (heck, we see that across 4 judges, never mind hundreds and thousands of phone voters!), people voting on personality, people picking up the phone for the person they actually recognise, people voting for their favourite professional even if the celeb is rubbish, and people simply picking up to vote because they liked the music, or because one of the judges said something mean, and so on and so forth.

As long as people treat it as purely a dance competition then they're going to be disappointed when the "best" dances go out (though IMO it's not always as clear-cut as some would have us believe).

Treat it as reality TV based around a dance competition, because that is what it is. There will always be upsets and the public will frequently vote in a way that seems peverse to dance officionados, etc. That's the nature of reality TV, and the reality of a dance competition where, effectively, half the judges marks are awarded by people who frequently don't know their ares from their elbow when it comes to the dances they are judging.

Giving the judges the final say is stupid imo. It's the wrong solution to the wrong problem. It looks like an attempt to have it both ways: keeping a public vote element because otherwise people would be much less interested in the show, but trying to restrict the result to a very limited number of 'acceptable' options.

There are roughly two problems with the votes. There are the those in the last few weeks, and there are the Spoony and Gabby type early exits. The former aren't really problems, because it's not clear what authority anyone has to overturn the public's decisions. If they're going to have input at all, the show should simply be about who they want to see dancing, not who is best objectively/according to the judges.

The Spoony and Gabby type exits are a problem because it's doubtful that The Public intends them. Whilst people talk about the 'stupid British public choosing' to kick out the better dancers, this isn't a good metaphor. The public don't get together and vote as a collective, and not only will probably most of them be voting for a non-rubbish dancer anyway, but mostly those who are supporting a rubbish dancer would rather a good one didn't go instead. Nor is there any warning of this until the voting actually ends. The voting system is just designed to make problems happen: The relative numbers of votes each dancer needs to stay in are heavily weighted by the judges (so it's hard to know how many they need), the votes are for individual dancers staying in (rather than for individuals going out and the rest staying in), and there's no update on how the voting is going. If your aim is to keep the best 2/3 of the dancers, the options available are not very useful for you voting alone, even if you could guess who was at risk, which you can't. (If the judges had one phone vote each and weren't allowed to confer, would any of them have voted for eg Gabby?It's easy to show what you want with marks out of ten.) This is absurd, because probably most people would rather someone near the bottom of the leaderboard went, even if they can't agree on who it should be, yet all attempts to decide whether it's eg Kate or Kenny who goes put the other dancers at risk. It's ridiculous that such a thing as 'middle-table syndrome' exists at all. Having second favourite Matt in the bottom 2 this week just underlines that.

Giving the judges the vote means that power is taken away from the public as to who actually goes, whereas bizarre early exits happen because they don't have enough power over who actually goes, imo.

Other voting systems (dual voting, etc) wouldn't have this problem. It may well be that the BBC likes the shocks however, as they make the show more exciting.

I don't like the new system and I do think it is working against what they are trying to do. It gives more opportunity for the judges to think they are the stars of the show and not the dancers.....(and their egos are already big enough). This show seems to be less and less about the dancing and more and more about what the judges think. In addition to this the 'dance off' is terrible.....and it must be a little degrading to the contestants. No system is going to be fair…or produce results that I agree with – but this system seems detrimental to the concept of the show.