Tony Adams dancing with Katya Jones
EVERY carping complaint is delightful, every moan that Strictly Come Dancing is being ruined sounds like a chorus of nightingales singing their sweetest tunes.
Trust me, if you want to take some time out of your busy lives and destress for 15 minutes, let me suggest that each Monday morning you grab a mug of coffee, boot up Twitter and scan through the posts relating to Tony Adams’s continued presence on their holy Saturday night show.
The faithful are now annoyed and irritated, and it’s great.
Having spent the past 20 years investing far too much energy into who wins a dance-themed competition, scored by a panel of panto judges and then decided by the whim of a telephone vote, they are furious that their Dad-dancer in chief has yet to be eliminated.
It’s now been a hilarious feat of survival running for seven weeks, and yet never has our captain found himself in the relegation dance-off.
All the time, ol’ Tone has been dancing in a sequined Arsenal top, or a Des Lynam pullover, or whatever, waving his arm less than rhythmically to the Grandstand theme or Hot Chocolate’s You Sexy Thing.
It is the most masterful trolling of a television programme happy to churn out the same tired formula every year we’ve ever seen, and slowly but surely it’s beginning to dawn on the viewers just how well Arsenal are supported.
“Arsenal fans give it a rest now… better dancers are getting put out!,” said one of the tweets in another glorious collection of pure anger this week. Another: “Jesus, who is voting for them? Makes a joke of the programme. Full of mistakes and dad dancing.”
There are hundreds of these exasperated posts: “How many more weeks of this facade?”, says another, maybe meaning farce. I hope they meant farce. That’s the fantastic disruptor element to all of this after all.
One sleuth who clocked the pattern added online: “Better dancers are being eliminated. I wonder if it is Arsenal supporters voting for Tony on an organised basis rather than the ‘Great British public’?”
Yes, I wonder.
This week, the Strictly stans were even calling for a change in the voting system to stop there ever being another Tony Adams again. Surely that should go to a referendum on electoral reform. When this is the response, you know you’re upsetting the orthodoxy.
The organisers of the show perhaps did not contend with just how truly obsessive Arsenal fans are, and their determined approach to any – any! – public phone vote.
TV programmes don’t want to lose this element because all those texts and calls bring in money.
They must be torn as Adams fumbles his dance moves but still sails through each week, but then look at the balance sheet and see how the Arsenal support – their are 20 million people following Islington’s finest on Twitter alone – are raining in a cash-spinning number of votes.
If you give the public the chance to cast a ballot on anything though, don’t be surprised if you get burned. As we have perhaps seen with politics here and beyond, they are often tempted to press the berserker button and smash everything up.
And if they don’t do that they will do something childish or droll. We saw this when “Boaty McBoatface” was backed as the name for the UK’s new polar research ship.
Even this week, the Scots cut a consultation down to size when a poll to select the new name for Perth Museum was chosen as “Perth Museum”.
Tony Adams was a hero of a footballer, and an inspiration in life: a man who has tackled his demons and helped others with addiction to do the same.
He’s not the greatest dancer, but he actually sums up the original point of the show: a complete novice learning a way onto the dancefloor.
That’s a much better story than a pop star or West End actor already with some history in the game. No – it’s far more beautiful the way pro-dancer Katya Jones has got him trying his best like he’s in the FA Cup final each week, and then how the Arsenal fanbase mobilises when the signal goes up.
It’s Saturday night tomorrow; you know what to do…
Keeeeeep dancing!
