It takes months or years of training to be a top professional dancer and yet judges expect near perfection from the celebs after just one week of training. If you think about this it makes a nonsense out of the show and the judges' scores.

The judges give very high marks to dancers when they're much slower than the pro-standard. Austin's dance on Saturday was so slow - it was a fast dance - but he was so slow and yet the judges gave him high marks. CRH did say he was bit slow in the after-show chat. If you compare every dance to the professionals when dancing, it's much slower. Is a 9 or 10 given to a celebrity the same score the judges would give to the pro-dancers? I doubt it.

I think this year some of the scores have been to high. Some of Len's scoring has been silly. I don't know if four nines or four tens is possible in one week of training. If it is, I guess dancing at or close to a professional level isn't as hard as I was led to believe!

Don't they practice for several weeks before the series starts though? I'm sure there was some talk that Kate Garraway was not going to be Anton's partner last year, but the original person had pulled out leaving him with only about 2 weeks to practice with Kate, who was the only person they could get to fill in.

But they're not competing against pros, if they were judged by a professional standard no one would ever get higher than a five or six and they'd have to break out minus paddles for the bad dancers.

But taking that attitude would be incredibly silly since then no one would ever be able to achieve a 9 or 10 on this show.

The dancer's are marked in comparison to one another, not on a professional level.

I think Strictly may find it difficult to get celebs to join the show next year after the fiasco of John, the bickering and all out fighting between the judges, the over the top criticism of the contestants and the nasty vile personal comments to the celebs/contestants! Who wants to be humiliated on TV before millions? Personally, I would not dream of going on the show after this year's revelations of what really goes on back-stage at this weekly show. What a bitchy lot they are in professional ballroom dancing!! WOW

Those in the know have said that actually professional dancing is not scored on a 1-10 basis - it's done by comparing couples in a big knockout contest, and gradually whittling them down as they compare each one. So to compare SCD with professional competition scores is a nonsense in itself.

As claire2281 said, dancers are marked by comparing the standard they've reached with the standard of other celebs, as well as the stage they're at in the competition. I don't think the dances that scored high in week 1 would do so now, because the bar has shifted so far in two months.

Somehow I don't think there will be any difficulty getting some celebs to join, in fact after all the publicity this series they will be queueing to sign up.