My strictly dream will become Ed Balls’ living nightmare
My wife and daughter vetoed my appearance because they believed it would mean social humiliation in the eyes of friends, family and all right-thinking people
AS a new series of Strictly Come Dancing begins, my thoughts turn to the magical day I was invited to appear on the show.
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I would love to. I just need to clear it with my wife and daughter.”
“No,” my wife and daughter said as one. “NO! NO! NO! Are you INSANE?”
Funny enough, neither of them fancied the idea of dear old dad bumping and grinding with some hard-bodied little East European hoofer on Saturday night and then showing my bashful face at the school gates on Monday morning.
I accepted — like a shot — because I thought it would be a laugh, or “a journey”, as we say on Strictly.
My wife and daughter vetoed my appearance because they believed it would mean social humiliation in the eyes of friends, family and all right-thinking people.
Both of them were concerned how my Argentine tango would go down with the Scottish headmistress at my daughter’s school. Not well, it’s fair to say. So I put off the Strictly producers with some feeble excuse about my impossible workload hoping — praying — that they would ask me again next year and that my wife and daughter might warm to the idea.
But Strictly, now in its 14th series and bigger than ever, never called again.
My invitation to dance is now yellowing with age and curling at the edges — rather like me.
And my wife and daughter STILL talk about my wish to do Strictly as if I had suggested changing my sex.
So I can’t help but look at all this year’s Strictly contestants with a mixture of envy and relief.
Envy because Strictly Come Dancing is the best show on television.
In these days of DVD boxed sets, YouTube and Netflix, Strictly is the only TV show that my family watches together.
And relief because that is not going to be me up there looking like a sweaty, overweight, middle-aged lump dressed in scrotum-hugging fluorescent Lycra.
It is going to be Ed Balls.
You can never tell who is going to soar on Strictly and who is going to crash, burn and step on some Polish dancer’s painted toenails.
Some contestants are so bad they are good — like John Sergeant, adored by the nation on Strictly, despite moving as though his feet were nailed to the dance floor.
Astrologer Russell Grant was wonderful on Strictly, despite looking nothing like anyone’s idea of a great dancer. Yet Russell danced with a joy that was contagious.
But boxer Joe Calzaghe was a total disaster, despite looking the part.
I had no doubt Joe would win — all that skipping in the gym, all that fancy footwork — but sadly Calzaghe was judged to dance “like a wardrobe” by Craig Revel Horwood.
You never can tell. Although usually you have a pretty good idea.
Attractive young women who possibly already know one or two dance moves are always a good bet to reach the later stages.
This Strictly has a lot of them – model Daisy Lowe, singer Louise Redknapp and TV presenter Laura Whitmore are unlikely to disgrace themselves.
Fat old white blokes tend to fare less well.
Ed Balls, funnily enough, looks as though he truly loves to dance. Which, as my wife is fond of telling me, is not the same as being any good at it.
“Just because you like eating,” my missus tells me with a stern look, “that doesn’t make you a great chef.”
Ed Balls, 50 next birthday, has more chance of being the next Prime Minister than he has of winning Strictly.
But I wish him well because Ed carries the hopes of all us dad dancers, all the half-cut geezers who ever took to a dance floor with wedding cake smeared down their shirt, all the disco dancing fools who ever practised Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk with just their bedroom mirror for a partner.
We can dream of dancing on Strictly. And leave Ed to live the nightmare.
Not time to leaf yet, Clive
TV critic Clive James has been fighting leukaemia for more than six years.
In 2012 he told Radio 4 that the illness “had beaten him” and he was “near the end”.
Yet British TV’s favourite Australian is still with us. Not only that, he has a brilliant new book out – Play All: A Bingewatcher’s Notebook about the new golden age of TV and our obsession with shows like Game Of Thrones, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
In 2014 James published what I suspect many will come to consider his greatest work – a poem called “Japanese Maple” about a tree bought for him by his daughter.
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The poem is a beautiful, moving reflection about how the tree will surely live longer than he will and how life goes on even after we are gone.
“Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colours will live on as my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last – and then was gone.”
The good news is that Clive James is still with us.
The bad news is the tree in the poem just died.
Merkel's mistake
THE reality of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s reckless open door policy is starting to bite hard in Germany.
After welcoming more than a million refugees last year, Germany suddenly finds it needs an extra 100,000 nursery places and 200,000 secondary school places right now.
No country in the world could provide education, homes, jobs and happiness to those sorts of numbers.
And Germany will suffer for Merkel’s wicked act long after she is pushing up edelweiss.
Roots of racism
“I HAVE more roots than Kunta Kinte,” said a character on Coronation Street, sparking 300 complaints of racism.
The reference to Kunta Kinte, the African slave in the brilliant Seventies TV series Roots, would have meant nothing to anyone under the age of fifty.
If anyone thinks this anodyne little line was genuinely racist, it is lucky they were not around in the Seventies when there was genuine racism in the air we breathed.
Racism that was, ironically enough, countered by the enormously popular Roots.
EU blew your big chance
THE Prime Minister is currently the most popular politician in the country because she promises us that this country is leaving the European Union. And we believe her.
No fudging. No second referendum. No denial of what 17.4 million us voted for.
The greatest mandate in our nation’s history cannot be denied.
Theresa May makes it clear that the Brexit deniers are bleating in the wind. This country is leaving the EU.
And as every day passes, the decision to leave looks like the right one.
British manufacturing is soaring. Workless households are down while in the Eurozone youth unemployment among the under-25s is now at shockingly high levels – 43.9 per cent in Spain, 39.2 per cent in Italy and 50.3 per cent in Greece.
The EU isn’t working.
Brexit denier Tony Blair tells us that we still have the chance to remain in the EU. But why would anyone want to?
Hair's to happiness
A THIRD of girls aged ten to 15 are unhappy with their appearance, according to a report by the Children’s Society. Only a third?
I would have guessed that the majority of teenagers hate the way they look.
I spent years trying to get my hair to look like Rod Stewart’s on the cover of Every Picture Tells A Story, but it always came out as more Dave Hill in Slade, above, inset.
There is nothing unprecedented about teenagers sighing in front of the mirror.
They call it growing up.
New Renee
RENEE Zellweger – starring in the new Bridget Jones film – still looks good.
But she just doesn’t look anything like the ravishing natural beauty who stole Tom Cruise’s heart in Jerry Maguire any more.
Jungle trouble for French farmers
TOMORROW sees the start of a protest by French farmers, shopkeepers and businessmen who vow to blockade the motorway into Calais until the camp known as The Jungle is closed down.
Who can blame them? There has never been any excuse for waving thousands of migrants through to northern France.
The Jungle is a ghetto for economic migrants.
Even after the terror attacks of recent times, you can hardly be considered a war refugee when the country you are trying to flee is France.