Why the Strictly dancers have a duty of care to get jabbed
AWe’ll never know what would have happened if the BBC had put its foot down
few months ago, an erstwhile friend told me she wasn’t going to get vaccinated. “Everyone around me has been,” she explained, “so why would I bother?” That was when she earned herself the “erstwhile” prefix. Vaccine hesitancy I can work around, but intrinsic, eye-watering selfishness? That’s terminal. Nobody either needs it in a friend or wants it in a colleague. Because as anyone who has ever worked in a professional setting will tell you, all it takes is that one Nonteam Player to upset the balance.
The producers of Strictly Come Dancing are unfortunate enough to have two defiant NTPS involved in their 19th series, which began in earnest on Saturday night. Although in fact there were originally three professional dancers who refused to be vaccinated before slipping into their spangles. And it’s a misfortune the BBC has brought upon itself.
Given you still can’t get on a Tube without being told to mask up, allowing a bunch of unjabbed dancers and celebs to mount one another on stage seems to be the height of lunacy. And I’d love to know how long the two vaccine refuseniks would have kept up their self-serving stances, had the corporation told them that, while they respected the integrity of their “my body, my choice” narrative (that’s the one that makes a mockery of everyone else’s bodies and choices), they could not jeopardise a multi-million-pound TV production enjoyed by over eight million people on the basis of two people’s whimsies. I bet the pair would have been rolling up their sleeves before you could say “scamdemic”.
I use the word whimsy advisedly. Because as any telly insider will tell you, before filming a programme such as Strictly, these cast members will already have been “subjected” to full medicals, probably psychological evaluations – and they will definitely have been made to stand naked but for a disposable thong as a stranger hoses them down with spray tan. So the idea that one might accept all that without demur, but draw the line at an injection that might save your life? Incredible, irrational: whimsical.
We’ll never know what would have happened if the BBC had put its foot down. Because the corporation was too cowardly to do what is now the norm in Hollywood, where they bow down at the altar of big budgets and audience figures and have for some time now implemented mandatory vaccination policies on sets. And now, just one show in, Strictly is two contestants down, with a BBC spokesperson announcing on Sunday that both “Tom Fletcher and Amy Dowden have tested positive for Covid-19”, and that because “the pair are now self-isolating”, they will miss next Saturday’s show.
There is no suggestion that either the Mcfly singer or his dancing partner are among the unvaccinated, and anyone could have brought that spiked viral molecule onto the Strictly set last week, but it doesn’t take a Sage epidemiologist to work out that if you don’t get Covid, you won’t be passing it
on. See how that works? And in the temperate words of judge Anton du Beke: “If you get one of those [cases] you can sort of survive, but if you get something that spreads through the group, well, that’s the end of the show.”
Tom Cruise was less temperate last year, when he infamously subjected two crew members standing too close to one another on the Mission Impossible 7 set to a foul-mouthed tirade: “You can tell it to the people who are losing their ––––ing homes because our industry is shut down. It’s not going to put food on their table or pay for their college education. [This is about] the future of this ––––ing industry!” Yet the US actor was largely championed for his outburst. Maybe
because people understood that those who endure in showbusiness are made of stern stuff. Or maybe because you stand between a Mission Impossible fan and his next fix at your own peril.
Strictly fans are just as devout, if not more so. Which may explain the vaccine refuseniks’ sudden fear of being exposed. After those fans took to social media to air their fury at the show being jeopardised, these two hired lawyers to help protect their identities – lawyers you’ll be relieved to hear the BBC are refusing to pay for. And with the services of the London firm Payne Hicks Beach costing up to £650 an hour, that’s going to end up stinging a lot more than a little prick to the arm.