They shoot horses, don't they?
The Strictly scandal and the dressage debacle
A strange symmetry appeared in this week’s non-political news. Two stories from very different parts of the popular world contained some interesting parallels.
The first saga concerned the programme that the powers-that-be at the BBC have considered their flagship for two decades, Strictly Come Dancing. Say what you like about the Corporation and its failures, but the whole world loves Strictly. Except me, of course. My family like it, but I stopped watching not because I thought that the amateur dancers were a bit rubbish, but because they are depressingly, ridiculously good. As the world’s worst dancer I am always astonished by just how flexible, athletic and nimble the actors and TV stars I’ve never heard of before (now that the Sergeant/Balls/Widdecombe era is over) are after just a few weeks rehearsing with their professional partners.
I suppose we always knew that this kind of proficiency could only come at a cost. Usually in slog, frustration and exhaustion. Then one of the last series’s contestants went very public with accusations that her professional male partner had, essentially, bullied her. On Wednesday the actor Amanda Abbington - who I saw in Zeller’s The Son not so long ago - told her story to fellow contestant and Channel 4 News host, Krishnan Guru-Murthy. It was a very sympathetic interview suggesting that, though Abbington’s partner Giovanni Pernice contests them, Guru-Murthy at all events gives Abbington’s complaints credence. Later on the TV programme Loose Women, the presenter began a segment on the story with the words “The Strictly crisis continues to dominate the headlines”. Which apart from the stand-down of Joe Biden, Keir Starmer’s first PMQs and numerous announcements from the new government, I guess it did.
The BBC is, of course investigating (as when is it not?), tapes are said to exist, and Pernice has departed the show. Meanwhile in the wake of the original story the agent of another professional dancer, Graziano Di Prima, has more or less admitted that he kicked his partner Zara McDermott during a rehearsal. For their part the agency are owning up to just the one kick, but McDermott has suggested that there may have been more.
It’s notable that Pernice is one of Strictly’s most successful professionals, partnering his way to victory once and the finals several times since he joined the show just under a decade ago. In other words he is a dance alchemist, supremely good at turning terpsichorean lead into gold. Tangled, unco-ordinated limbs in, Cyd Charisse out.
Whip crack away!
On Tuesday the woman sometimes described as “the best rider in the world” and one of Great Britain’s top hopes for medals in the Olympic Games, Charlotte Dujardin, pulled out of the Games after a video emerged of her using a whip over and over again on a horse in training. Her sport is dressage - a kind of equine Crufts - where the horses perform a number of distinctly unnatural manoeuvres which are deemed aesthetically pleasing and demonstrate the rider’s control. It is not a sport I know much about, save to say that I can’t see why the medals won shouldn't be better awarded to the horse than the rider.