Come Again

As this is Irk The Purists, there's only one place you can go from Whitehouse. And that is, as if you couldn't guess, Strictly Come Dancing. I love, love, love almost everything about this show. The costumes. The celebrities. The judges (especially Len Goodman- where is this man's knighthood?). Cherie Lunghi's gloves. Mark Foster's bizarre costume choices. Bruce's increasingly lame jokes. And Tess Daly's total inability to display any dancing aptitude whatsoever, despite the title of the show she co-presents.

But, there are times when I simply have to leave the room. And those times are when the couples (or possibly the show's producers) eschew the classics and decide to dance their tango, their foxtrot or their waltz to something modern, upbeat and appealing to the fabled 18-24 demographic, by, say, the Kaiser Chiefs, Amy Winehouse or the Pigeon Detectives (OK, I may have imagined the last one, but the first two have definitely made appearances in this series).

I know that on a blog devoted to the contrary, the uncool and the impure, you might expect your correspondent to laud such choices. Well I don't. It makes me cringe. This series, for example, we've had paso dobles danced to Blur's Song 2, Survivor's Eye of The Tiger, Europe's The Final Countdown and Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love (and this Daily Telegraph correspondent eloquently expresses just how vulgar and jarring such juxtpositions are), as well as tangos to 20th Century Boy by T Rex and David Bowie's Rebel Rebel. And while some modern songs are occasionally, surprisingly sympathetic in the context of the show (Estelle's American Boy worked quite well for Heather Small's cha cha), in general the sight of celebs performing dances that are often steeped in history to upbeat pop with jarring lyrics gives me the boak. Seeing as the BBC seems to be in a conciliatory mood at the moment, can we have a ban on all music post-1953 in the next series, please?