THREE STRIPES, YOU’RE OUT

I love dance and I love to watch it, from Fred and Ginger to Fonteyn and Nureyev, from Torvill and Dean to the Nicholas Brothers. So of course I have never seen Strictly Come Dancing, any more than an aficionado of song bothers with karaoke or a barbeque draws a gourmet. I gather from the extraordinarily extensive media coverage of recent days that Strictly Come Dancing is a pro-am ballroom tournament shown as BBC1’s riposte to the “talent” tourney, The X Factor, on ITV at peak on Saturday nights, in which capacity the BBC evidently loses out, in ratings if not in the extent of publicity.

As I say, I have not seen any part of any edition of this particular “entertainment”, some of the reason why I come late to the discussion. You might argue that, given this lack of homework, I should shut my trap and forbear the expression of a view. To which I respond: grow up. No commentator, pundit or columnist, pro or am, allows innocence of a detail to prevent airing the “wisdom” of experience in the larger matter. I have seen enough evidence of this exhibit on the television news and in the papers to form a view. As was once remarked by Clive James (my least favourite television critic but he was sound in this instance), it isn’t necessary to eat the whole apple to know that it is sour (or at any rate words to that effect, and he certainly wasn’t the first to remark it, the proverbial curate’s egg being a variant of the same observation).

The “am” in this mix are not merely amateurs but, in the modern requirement, “celebrities”. So, part of the premise of this programme is understood to be that contestants are being gallant or, in the phrase enshrined in a Saturday night title of a generation ago, “game for a laugh”. Gallant indeed has been the focus of the recent media interest, one-time BBC News political correspondent John Sergeant. Sergeant has been competing as one of the “celeb” dancers, despite the – one might hazard – distinct disadvantage of being possessed of the physical grace of a hippopotamus that has contrived to emerge from the water on its hind legs. The judges in the studio – dance professionals all, I believe, one of whom used to step out with a flat-mate of mine – evidently have noted this departure from traditional ballroom practice and accordingly marked down Sergeant’s performance. However – ay, there’s the rub – the viewers get a say in the matter too. And the viewers, most of whom of course could not tell Ann Miller from Darcy Bussell, have been taught by television itself to be more captivated by celebrity than by ability.

So here is the contradiction at the heart of this particular enterprise: the experts and the lay viewers have differing expectations, differing requirements, differing judgments. There is indeed nothing strictly about it. And television, by gradually but decisively ridding itself of all reliance on gravitas, knowledge, experience and wisdom in favour of the culture of celebrity, has exactly set up the conditions in which its chosen experts in any field, however doubtful, are not going to be given any credit by the viewers. In this face-off, John Sergeant is the hero, the man of the people, the victim, the popular choice and the celebrity, all rolled into one. He has gallantly done what the judges could not: he has removed himself. However they play it, the judges are bound to come across as ungracious, churlish, pedantic and not in the spirit of the thing (I am surmising wildly here but you will tell me if I miss it by much). Sergeant, the while (and no surmise needed) can write his ticket as a celeb for years to come, opening fêtes, switching on Christmas lights, making after-dinner speeches, advertising anything he wishes to (footwear, perhaps) and entertaining customers on cruise liners. But I don’t think I’d cast him in a revival of Rodgers and Hart’s On Your Toes.

All this was perfectly well adumbrated in the most recent run of the various knockout series (BBC1 Saturday nights again) in which performers who aspire to a career in the stage musical undergo repeated auditions for a role in an actual production in the West End. I have watched and been caught up in these entertainments because I love musicals (and genuine musical talent is at a premium in these contests), because something is genuinely at stake and because the contestants are not celebrities. Nevertheless, in the casting of a Nancy for Sir Cameron Mackintosh’s latest revival of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!, the final viewers’ vote did not favour the auditioner whom Sir Cameron and his ally Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted. The production, which opens early next year, is stuck with a Nancy whom Mackintosh would not have cast. You wonder whether Sir Cameron or Lord Lloyd Webber will agree to risk such an outcome again.

So there was an authentic talent contest going on in those series. Strictly Come Dancing would appear to be a whole other kettle of fish. It’s merely another celebrity survival contest. We live in a time in which any observation, sentiment, opinion, assessment, stance or philosophy – however vapid, commonplace, ignorant, malicious, oppressive or dangerous – is rendered somehow significant and valuable if uttered by someone who is deemed to be a celebrity. By the same token, any contribution made by an expert, someone with knowledge and experience, is dismissed out of hand if that expert has never appeared in a sitcom or soap, “competed” in some such farrago as I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! or had sex with somebody famous and then talked about it for money.

In a somewhat tenuous way, John Sergeant has been deemed a celebrity. His fame was sealed by a Moment that has become the stuff of telly-clip legend. This was the occasion when, as a political reporter, he was addressing the BBC news camera live on the prospects for Margaret Thatcher’s survival of a challenge against her by Michael Heseltine as party leader (and hence, at the time, prime minister) when the PM herself emerged from the building behind him and descended the steps with a gleam in her eye that betokened that she had something momentous to impart. Sergeant was obliged – you might think significantly – to execute a not particularly nifty sideways shuffle and utter some bromide along the lines of “here’s a microphone”, that he might play any further part in the scene. As a Great Telly Moment, it hardly bears much examination but it is thought – at least by BBC mandarins – to be up there with Michael Fish discounting the possibility of a hurricane.

You do fall to wondering who chose Sergeant for the dancing contest and why he was chosen. Was it perceived that his inability would indeed become a selling point, that he would prove an Eddie the Eagle of the Palais de Dance? Well, Sergeant now has his second claim to fame, his voluntary departure from the dancing fray so that he might avoid the absurdity of actually winning the thing. He could not resist, so the news clips revealed, a sly dig at the judges; former colleagues from the Westminster lobby have not been slow to account his demeanour in those days as less than collegiate and indeed inclined to the waspish. This is of no consequence to the celeb-loving viewers for whom Sergeant has become a Chaplinesque lightning rod, a little man against the world.

This is all very well but it is a further nail in the coffin of anything truly authoritative ever again being uttered on the broadcast media. If the BBC had wanted a programme wholly dependent on a popular vote, setting it in a world of accomplishment was bound to raise a brouhaha. Equally, there is little point in installing experts to give their opinions based upon long professional experience if the outcome does not require this input.

I appreciate that the matter of who governs us is determined by the lay vote but government and leadership are not solely about a particular skill and/or artistic presentation. Barack Obama appealed to a wide skein of responses, drawing support from many different constituencies and on the basis of many different expectations. Don’t rule out, however, the possibility that in the future prime ministers will be determined by a Saturday night knockout contest on television, featuring a panel of expert judges whose views may be discounted by the voting audience. I doubt somehow that John Sergeant will be invited to sit as a judge, though.