Strictly Tango: the dances
16th December 2008
On Saturday 13th December, the three remaining contestants on Strictly Come Dancing finally took on the Argentine Tango.
Lisa and Brendan
As I said previously, Lisa and Brendan had the good stuff, music-wise; a decent kicking electro tango. Also, Lisa - possibly for the first time ever - looked bloody good.
The training footage showed Poor Ickle Brendan getting confused by having to learn a dance that's only, you know, been on the show for 3 years now... Ahem. Well, we caught a brief glimpse of the AT professionals - Kele Baker and Ralf Schiller - training Brendan, the lucky devils. Did I mention that Brendan hasn't got off his ass to even take an AT lesson until now? I did? Oh, good.
Anyway, the dancing...
The routine started off badly, Brendan putting his hands onto his hips for some weird reason... The music was driving well, but the routine was basically just a set of shapes and poses. Brendan's posture was very wrong, too upright. Lisa did a good job, but it was a lot of open hold "messing about", to quote Mr Gaucho Goodman. In fact, I didn't see a single walk.
And that ending, with her legs splayed apart - Christ that looked ugly.
Summary: reasonable effort, poor start and ending.
Score: 35 ( 8 / 8 / 10 / 9)
10? Blimey, Len, you're completely nuts.
Rachel and Vincent
For some reason, Rachel's dress wasn't doing anything for me - bit of a strange choice really. Combined with the music, a conspiracy theorist might almost have imagined that Vincent was being handicapped. Surely not.
Skipping past the boring footage, onto the dance.
Here's how it went:
- Starting off apart, with some lovely adornos moving towards each other.
- Bicycletta with ganchos into a spin turn, then a looong backwards travelling lift
- Another turn then a travelling corkscrew across the floor
- Ochos, sandwich, backwards high planeo into a turn then a low planeo
- Double volcada
- Travelling sacada
- Rotating back sacadas
- Lift and turnaround, then another lift
- More forwards sacadas, then into a soltada and walkaround
- Step up into a third lift, then dip to finish
Or, putting it another way, Holy Fuck.
Looking at it again - and again and again - it was magnificent. Marvellous.
That was the form. In short, it had nothing but content - 100% from start to finish. None of this messing around posing or overacting, just pure dancing.
Rachel's technique was superb - I've seen worse from professional tango dancers. She looked cool, collected, focussed and totally connected with her partner.
It was by far the best AT from celebs I've seen on SCD, and in fact I preferred it to last week's weird table dance demonstration thing from the pros.
Score: 39 (9 / 10 / 10 / 10)
If I had to critique it - and it's painful to do so - then I'd say that the music made it difficult, and that the choreography was maybe a bit too challenging - a little less sophistication and a little more crowd-pleasers might have been a better choice tactically. Still, I'm glad Vincent stuck to his principles and produced some fantastic tango.
Tom and Camilla
My hopes rise as Camilla appears - unlike last time she's not dressed as a cheap tart. Expensive tarts are OK - this is AT after all.
Then Tom starts Acting. Oh God, he's Acting. He's an Actor, you know. He's Checking His Watch.
I've no idea why the bloody hell he's checking his watch - and to be frank I couldn't give a toss. The story makes no sense to me. I mean, yes, OK, you could do a cabaceo-based story, possibly, but this ain't it, this is just rubbish.
Eventually he stops playing with the frickin' watch and remembers this is a dance competition not Ham It Up Day, so he goes over to Camilla and holds his hand out to her. Woo, big no-no there. But, hell, at least they're in hold now.
The routine... well, it's not diabolical although I still want to scream at Camilla "FOR GOD'S SAKE CLOSE YOUR LEGS WOMAN!!" half the time. The music's a bit useless, really. And Tom looks massively camp - is it possible this whole marriage thing is a scam? Stranger things have happened.
There's a few parts of the routine which are actually rather good - such as the walking bit (around 2:56 in that link). But there are also some fairly bad mistakes - for example, look at the way they screw up the rotating back sacadas around 3:25, compared to the way Rachel and Vincent utterly nail the same move - they're simply not in the same league. Plus, the whole "Oh look is that the time" stuff, what the hell's all that about?
But, you know, shorn of the rubbish at the start and the end, it's not diabolical.
Score: 34 (8 / 8 / 9 / 9)
I think that's fair - I think it was better than Lisa and Brendan's in form, but possibly worse in technique.
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- David Bailey, 16th December 2008