The great joy of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, which has long had a proclivity for the well behaved and proper, has been La Voix, a bedazzled drag queen always locked and loaded with a self-aggrandising quip and a withering aside. She has injected the show with a rare feeling of comic danger – telling Tess Daly her dress looks like a bathmat; remarking upon the authenticity of Craig Revel Horwood’s hair; eagerly asking the outgoing Claudia Winkleman how and where she should submit her CV to the BBC. It Takes Two, Strictly’s televisually comatose nightly spin-off show, has only ever come alive when La Voix is a guest. Note a recent moment in which a sent-in video from a well-wishing friend, a standard trope of these reality TV sister programmes, led to La Voix expressing mock admiration for their glittering ensemble: “See, when you’re not working or as busy as I am, you’ve got time to make costumes like that.”
La Voix, the alter ego of performer Christopher Dennis, is currently matched in this strain of anarchic camp by Alan Carr over on the BBC’s other runaway smash, The Celebrity Traitors. He, too, is a gay funnyman delighting in the fruits of his own mercilessness – in keeping with the show’s trademark goth-horror showboating, Carr has become more and more winkingly evil over the course of its run, relishing his role as the most profusely sweating yet bafflingly under-the-radar traitor of all.
