Posts Tagged ‘strictly come dancing’

I spent a little of last night, as the festive season faded and a whole new year and the return to work hove into view, watching the latest iteration of Celebrity Big Brother wipe it’s arse across my TV screen. As the usual array of desperate people, half-arsed film heroes and one hit blips on the music radar began to settle into the Big Brother house, in much the same fashion as their predecessors had last year, I got to thinking – is 2010 going to be any different from 2009? Will we have ANYTHING new in the coming months, rather than just a retread of everything that’s gone before? As we seep into January, it seems not. Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Clegg’s been getting a great deal of attention in the press at the Lib Dem conference this weekend. What I’ve taken away from Clegg’s conference manoeuvres, however, has not been the substance so much as the style in which it is presented.

But then it’s been a weekend of style over substance: 30-year-old Alesha Dixon, the winner of Strictly Come Dancing, who was brought in at the expense of the previous judge Arlene Phillips (66) to “give the show some youthful glamour” failed to win the wholehearted approval of the viewing public that the BBC were hoping for in the wake of the ageism row that erupted after Philips’ sacking.

She was, it seems, brought in to make the old men on the panel appear to be a little more sexy, although the official story is that she was brought in to speak with the voice of the viewer. Dixon’s failure to connect with the Strictly Come Dancing audiences this weekend – the show lost out badly to X Factor in its first week of competition – is surely a sign that there are plenty of people out there who value substance over good looks. It is also proof beyond doubt that the voice of the viewer is perfectly well-served by the BBC message boards.

Politics has, in the last 20 years, followed a similar pattern. Clegg became the head of the Lib Dems because he is clean-cut, looks good in a suit and is prepared to pose for the cameras at the pier with his wife or standing on Bournemouth beach, skimming stones on the sea. He has been brought in to be the acceptable face of the Lib Dems; their very own Alesha Dixon.

He got the job at the expense of Vince Cable, the balding, middle-aged Voice of Integrity™ who is, across the political spectrum, acknowledged as the man with the ideas and the substance to make a difference for the party. Spin dogma suggests that “the voters” want an attractive, personable head of the party, that it will make the Lib Dems more electable.

What it boils down to is that one really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover – and that it’s really time to make changes when the media start inspecting the dust jacket for signs of wear as well.

The Strictly Come Dancing results may indicate that the Lib Dems could have gambled on Cable and met the mood of the nation head on. Clegg has certainly been trying his hardest – he’s a decent politician, trying to provide substance – but the tax increases he’s been proposing will be a bitter pill for the public to swallow. Cable may be considered too old to be allowed to lead the party, but he’d surely be a more likely, trusted candidate to convince a sceptical public to accept these tax increases.

It’s against the norm for such things to happen, however. Every politician who takes a position of power has to be younger and more thrusting than the last – the pasty-faced old Etonian leaders of the opposition, Cameron and Osborne, are proof enough of this – and it may not stop until, finally, a good-looking and youthful celebrity is elected president of Britain, in a bizarre mockery of the American system, to distract from the underwhelming looks of the people who actually run the country.

Unless the Strictly Come Dancing audiences rise up and prevent it happening, of course. An armchair revolutionary is much more powerful now, thanks to the internet.

Style is just no substitute for integrity and brand authority and that seems, after this weekend, to have been made a little clearer to the world at large. We’ll have to wait and see if anything comes of this realisation, however.

When I saw the news that John Sergeant had apparently fallen on his sword and retired gracefully with a bow from Strictly Come Dancing, I initially thought to myself ‘What a magnificent publicity coup!’ With a little time and distance from that first reading, I have changed my mind – I am no longer convinced that Sergeant left the show willingly and, whilst the publicity is excellent for him, it would probably have been better had he stayed the course. Or had been allowed to stay the course.

Consider this; John Sergeant was clearly enjoying himself. His dancing was improving and he was clearly enjoying the onrush of cult status his continued survival on the show brought forth. Certainly the audience were relishing him – he may have scored consistently low with the judges, but each week there he was again, shuffling around the dance floor with a look of steely concentration in his eye.

The public tend to treat such shows as popularity contests rather than talent contests, and Sergeant’s slightly bumbling, hope-for-the-best dance persona was a natural winner in that context. I’m also certain that there were a large number of viewers voting for him who were simply delighted to see a more elderly gent shuffling through the numbers next to the bright young things you get everywhere these days; these voters are the same sort of people who registered their disapprobation with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand recently.

But there was clearly an enormous revolution amongst the judges and producers of the show and I would suggest that they pushed John Sergeant onto his sword. Why would he want to leave the show, after all? He was making a name for himself outside the political and journalistic circles he was best known for, an excellent example of the process I describe in The Fame Formula, wherein, to stay famous, a person has to come up with a new string to their bow every fifteen months.

It’s not as if, in these cash-strapped times, every talent show contest winner is going to make an enormous impact overnight. Last year’s Strictly Come Dancing winner, Alesha Dixon, has not been propelled into the celebrity stratosphere, as one might have normally expected – although this may change in the wake of her forthcoming album release.

John Sergeant, however gracefully he may have departed – in stark contrast to some of his performances on the dance floor – can surely not have wanted to go. His insistence that it was time to go before the joke wore thin was a definite publicity coup – he admitted his failings and got on with it – but the fact that he said “it’s like when you decide when you leave a party, and the time to leave a party is before the fight starts, and I think that’s really what’s happened on this occasion” is most revealing. The producers were clearly attempting to protect the Strictly Come Dancing brand and, if he had not gone, things may have become ugly.

PR people can ponder the publicity coup aspect all they like, but the truth of it is surely that the public have had the ability to decide the show taken away from them in the name of brand protection.