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| Dummy and dumber as Jackson falls at the last |
| Written by Administrator | |
| Tuesday, 20 December 2005 | |
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All hail the Dazzler, newly crowned king of dance. At the same time: Colin Jackson, what were you thinking of? Let’s not diminish in any way the magnitude of Darren Gough’s achievement in becoming the first male celebrity winner of the Strictly Come Dancing era and the first sports star to triumph in this notoriously uncompromising arena since records began, a full three series ago. But anyone with even a passing interest in pro-celebrity ballroom would have seen that it was Jackson’s title to lose and that, right at the last, the Olympic medal- winner blew it.
The judges had the athlete comfortably ahead of the cricketer after the evening’s first session and when the public phone vote eliminated a seemingly tireless Zoë Ball, Jackson was left facing the apparent formality of a head-to-head dance-off against Gough for victory. Plus the dance-off was freestyle, leaving Jackson able to reprise his perfect cha-cha-cha, revisit his vote-winning rumba or just big it up in general with his own selection of eye-pleasing moves. And what does Jackson do? He only goes and walks on with a blow-up doll. Or that’s what it looked like to begin with, although closer inspection revealed that the adult-size dummies taped to Jackson and Erin Boag, his partner, were more like rag dolls in constitution and strangely without real, gripping features of any kind. Even so, what were these props for? Handed one last opportunity to show us what they were made of as a couple, Jackson and Boag bizarrely chose to dance independently, each attached at the arms and legs to some kind of Muppet. Whichever way you looked at it, it made no sense. For instance, Boag was dressed as a man and dancing with a female Muppet. But so was Jackson. Didn’t the inevitable logic of the role-swap dictate that Jackson should have dressed as a woman and strapped himself to a male Muppet? A welter of potentially awkward sexual- political assumptions seemed to underlie the routine in a way that cannot have been helpful for the stunned phone voter at home. Neither can that phone voter have been impressed by the sight of Jackson standing in front of the judges, still tethered to a limp Muppet. He did not, at that moment, resemble someone on his way to ballroom glory. He resembled someone who had dropped in on his way to redress a shop window. One’s mind was cast back to the sage words of Bruno Tonioli: “Dance is not just a series of steps — you have to sell them.” On Saturday, Jackson was no more welcome, as a salesperson, than the man at the door with the crate of tea towels. What can one conclude, except that the pressure got to him? As such, Jackson’s last dance goes directly into the annals of the great sporting choke. Shades of Greg Norman at Augusta in 1996. Except that even Norman didn’t come out on the last day with his caddie tied to him. Disappointment isn’t the half of it. Jackson, we knew, had the elasticity. Early footage of him in training revealed that he was capable of getting his leg over Erin’s head, which, although not technically a sanctioned ballroom move, could have come in handy in an emergency. Moreover, his arms and hands — almost invariably the key problem areas for the ballroom novice, followed shortly after by the feet, the legs, the head and the torso — were repeatedly the subject of breathless approval from the judges. And more has been said about Jackson’s hips over the past ten weeks than was said about them during his distinguished career in sprint hurdling. At one stage, Arlene Phillips, who had renamed Jackson “Hot Hips”, pretty much promised him professional work when this Strictly Come Dancing business was done, leading one to wonder ruefully where Jackson might have been now as a dancer if tiresome old athletics hadn’t got in his way. But there’s no point fretting over what might have been. Instead, let’s hymn Gough in his triumph. Len Goodman has a phrase to connote flash without substance: “all sizzle and no sausage”. If Gough had been all sausage and no sizzle during this series, it could hardly have surprised us, given his size and build. Remember how unpromising the judges’ remarks were after his cha-cha-cha in round one, wherein he and Lilia Kopylova were derided as “the rhino and the showgirl” and wherein the Essex paceman was dismissed as a personality-free zone who could stand to lose some weight. Less stubborn cricketers would have wilted in the face of that kind of attack, but Gough stuck to it, played himself in and pulled it out of the pan after the dance of his life. Many interpreted the fast bowler’s early popularity as an extension of the feel-good factor from England’s Ashes victory in the summer. But look what happened. With the Strictly series well under way, England were shown up as a bunch of show ponies in Pakistan and Gough’s figures didn’t flinch. Glory be, and if no England recall follows this, there is no justice in cricket. Source |
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