It’s not Strictly about who’s best Dancer...
Judges’ top marks don’t guarantee win
BY IAN HYLAND
STRICTLY star Dan Walker has taken more than his fair share of flak from some of the show’s 10million viewers. The BBC Breakfast host has been told that he simply cannot dance. He’s been accused of stealing a place from better performers.
He has even been outed as a collaborator in a secret BBC plot to fix the result of this year’s contest!
This week though, Strictly’s Mr Mean, Craig Revel Horwood, not only admitted he likes Dan’s performances but accepted that if he makes it through to the final he could actually take home the Glitterball trophy.
Labelling Dan “the housewives’ favourite”, long-serving Craig admitted that the judges are almost powerless to stop him.
That’s because the contest is always weighted in favour of the contestants who do best in the public vote.
Thanks to our number-crunchers, we can confirm that the top-scoring dancer doesn’t always win.
In the show’s history the finalist who scored highest with the judges across the series has won in only nine out of 18 series.
A further boost to Dan’s hopes could be that the biggest upset in Strictly history was caused by another BBC Breakfast star, Chris Hollins. In 2009, the judges awarded Chris and his partner Ola Jordan more than 100 points fewer than the total they gave to runner-up Ricky Whittle and his partner Natalie Lowe across the series.
Recent history would also appear to favour Dan and Nadiya. In the past five years the judges’ favourite has only triumphed once – Kelvin Fletcher in 2019.
On the other four occasions it wasn’t even the judge’s second favourite who won.
Bill Bailey, Stacey Dooley, Joe McFadden and Ore Oduba were all third on the judges’ overall scorecards.
It’s enough to make you question whether the judges really do know what they are talking about.