Love cheats hugged as if their purgatory was over – good luck with that, kids!
As Strictly voters give Seann and Katya another chance...
THEY had been favourites to leave Strictly. But last night Seann Walsh and Katya Jones survived the public vote.
Comedian Walsh, 32, was publicly ditched by his girlfriend after he and Mrs Jones were pictured kissing. Mrs Jones’s husband Neil is said to have given Walsh a dressing down.
On Saturday night they impressed the judges with their Charleston and helped Strictly draw 10.6million viewers – the highest ratings of the series.
Campaigner and presenter Katie Piper became the third celebrity to leave the show last night. She and her partner Gorka Marquez lost out to actor Charles Venn and his partner Karen Clifton in the dance-off.
NEWSFLASH. Fresh doubts have been cast on the established saying that guilty feet have got no rhythm. This follows the success of love-cheats Seann Walsh and Katya Jones, who survived the vote-off in last night’s Strictly Come Cringeing.
When it was announced that the demi-lovebirds weren’t even in the bottom two, their relief was obvious. Silhouetted on the darkened stage, they hugged each other long and hard, daring to hope that their time in purgatory was over. Good luck with that, kids!
One thing. After being caught kissing passionately following a drunken night out, it might have been more respectful to their humiliated partners – her husband, his now ex-girlfriend – if Katya and Seann had just held hands instead.
Perhaps even bowed their heads for a moment’s silent contemplation, like all good penitents.
Instead, it was time to change your partners for the hokum hokey cokey, an upbeat routine in which Seann says he is ‘not as bad as I have been painted’ and Katya insists it was ‘a oneoff mistake’.
Maybe it was, but what makes this latest outbreak of the Strictly Curse so much worse is that her husband, Neil Jones, is one of the professional dancers on the show. Over the weekend, he haunted the Clauditorium – where host Claudia Winkleman holds court – silently seething with gingery malevolence whenever Seann hoved into view.
It was more awkward than Kate Silverton’s samba rolls, and that’s saying something.
Still, the star-crossed couple somehow survived their dance of shame. Seann and Katya’s pizza shop-themed routine might have been the most fraught Charleston ever danced on Strictly, but they were not the worst couple on the night. Yes, this despite the fact that Seann is as funky as a spatchcocked chicken with jackhammer knees – I’ll give him three more weeks at the very most.
Everyone coped with the biggest scandal to hit Strictly for years by pretending that it hadn’t really happened. It may have been the biggest elephant in the BBC room since real-life elephant Lulu pooped on Blue Peter in 1969, but the show had to go on.
‘We are expecting more drama tonight,’ said host Tess Daly on Saturday, but she meant Pasha and Ashley doing the tango. Still, there were a few sly references amid the smoulder of brisk disapproval.
‘It has been quite a week, but tonight it is all about the dance,’ said Tess firmly. A woman of course who has had her own troubles in the ballroom of the faithless spouse.
Footage of Seann and Katya’s rehearsal room introduced us to a brand new Strictly character – the Charleston expert.
‘Like all couples doing the Charleston, they have an expert in the room to help them,’ we were told, for the first time in the show’s 14year history.
We’re not fools, Auntie Beeb. We know a chaperone when we see one. It was as if Seann and Katya could not be trusted to be alone in a room together and that buckets of water were lined up out of sight, ready to be thrown over them should the unspeakable happen. There was punishment aplenty, if you looked for it.
AS A dance, the Charleston has nil erotic potential, but gorgeous Katya still had to dance it wearing the most unflattering outfit ever seen on Strictly: a baggy striped T-shirt, scarlet rompers and plimsolls.
Next week, I expect to see her dancing the rumba in a long red dress and white wimple.
The judges played it straight, even if it was impossible to avoid double entendre.
‘At times it was a little bit gangly, but I tell you, you went for it,’ Bruno Tonioli told Seann, while Darcey Bussell complimented him on his ‘great entry’.
Is there no escape from this endless cringe? No.
And at the end of it all, love rat Seann Walsh didn’t even have the grace to look abashed.
‘The lifts are the easiest bit,’ he said of his dance routines. ‘It’s the breathing I struggle with.’
That must be because of his hard heart – and ever harder neck.