What? Whaaat?
I’m not watching Strictly, but like you, I couldn’t avoid Gropegate. So I had to find out what the fuss was about in order to pronounce on this supposed scandal, after which a dance professional, Katya Jones, 35, and her partner, voice of GoCompare Wynne Evans, 52, had been on a grovelling apology tour and almost committed hara kiri on a chat show sofa, so ashamed and contrite were they about what had happened.
The Sun website had the whole thing. The pair were standing grinning in what I now know is called “The Clauditorium” after they’d performed for the nation on the shiniest floor in British television.
Reminder: this is not a cookery show. Or snooker. This is a show where the professional has to lick the “celebrity” into shape, and two become one in the higher calling of artistic expression. Full-body contact between the couple is constant, which is where the “Curse of Strictly” comes in. Couples literally get to second base, if not third, on the first day, and some, erm, pair up proper (my Celebrity SAS brother, Pete Wicks “off of” Towie, is this season’s showmancer).
Anyway, back to the video clips. Wynne is standing behind his dance partner Katya, with arm curled around her waist and hand resting on her flat abdomen. Then it shifts up an inch, or so, and she moves it down again. Later, she blanks him when he high fives her (that happened to me but far worse on Have I Got News For You once. I tried to high five Ian Hislop after we’d won and he said, “I don’t do high fives” and I wanted to die, again). AND THAT’S IT.
What were they apologising for? Who made them? Why draw so much attention to it? Surely, when and if in hole – and Strictly has been in a bit of a hole, of late – stop digging? It’s completely mystifying and so tone deaf and also, and here we come to my broader point – it’s so out of touch.
Rivals is a riotous, anti-woke grope-athon
It’s out of touch as it the times are, at last, a changin’. The BBC seems unaware that it has a huge sleeper hit on its hands with Industry, now in its third series, which has full frontal everything, drugs, jokes about “woke coke”, gambling, smoking, lying, basically it’s bonking and banking and bedlam on stilts and I can’t get enough of it. This is where the corporation should be, making addictive, cutting edge content, not forcing adults to apologise for nowt and making a stupid drama out of a non-crisis.
The BBC isn’t blowing its trumpet about Industry because presumably it’s terrified people will watch it but Disney meanwhile, is streaks (literally, as you will see in the first episode) ahead of Auntie, as Rivals starts tomorrow, based on Jilly Cooper’s book about regional television in Rutshire. It’s solid gold, 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, two thumbs up telly and stars everyone, either in perms and puffball taffeta dresses, or their birthday suits.
I went to a screening where rows of hardened hacks wept with laughter at the risqué gags, the satire, and the fact that Rupert Campbell-Black plays naked tennis with Emily Atack and you see everything. Everything. Yes, as the director proudly tells, us, “you see a willy for every pair of tits.”
It’s breathtakingly bold telly. Because it’s set in the Eighties, ie before political correctness and any obligation to commission content through the prism of identity politics and post-colonial guilt greyed our screens, it’s a total treat. Rivals is a riotous, anti-woke grope-athon and anyone who finds a single frame of it “offensive” is dense and doesn’t deserve to watch it.
In fact, all television executives should be made to watch Industry, and Rivals – the opening credits alone should give them a collective heart attack – and yes, Slow Horses and Succession, and take note. Audiences and people are less righteous, less judgy, less humourless, less puritanical, than the bosses fear.
I couldn’t care less where Wynne’s hand was and wouldn’t know about it now unless the BBC had over-reacted to some two-second clip going viral on social media.
All bosses need to ask themselves if something kicks off is, what would Jilly Cooper do? Jolly Sooper would never break a butterfly on a wheel as the BBC has done over Gropegate.
After all that, I still can’t work out for the life of me what Katya and Wynne were apologising for, and to whom, or why. Can you?
