Strictly Mail Hypocrisy

You didn’t know that a new series of Strictly Come Dancing begins this evening? But it’s all over the Daily Mail, with the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul mouthed Paul Dacre playing both sides of the dance floor in no style at all, which means one name has to be commenting on the show: step forward Amanda Platell, who claims to be a regular viewer but cannot remember who used to co-host alongside Bruce Forsyth.

Viewers may want to look away now

Nor, it seems, has Ms Platell bothered to read what her fellow Northcliffe House inmates are writing about the show before committing her customarily tedious efforts to print. “Ever since Brucie quick-stepped into our living rooms 11 years ago, I have been an unashamed addict” she claims, before letting readers in to a secret: “Yet this year I fear for my beloved Strictly … something has changed - and not for the better”.

Yes? Yes yes? Yes yes yes? “It’s not just that Brucie has gone and been replaced with Tess Daly, a woman with the intellect of an ironing board and a charisma lobotomy”. Yeah, right. It would be difficult, O Strictly addict, for Ms Daly to have replaced the bloke with whom she co-presented the show for all those years. But she does have a good word for Claudia Winkelman, which makes a change for the Mail.

Nor, it seems, is it because she finds the contestants “so lacklustre” - “I’ve never heard of most of them”. Yes, Daily Mail investigative journalist has not heard of Ainsley Harriott, Jamelia, Carole Kirkwood, Katie Derham, Peter André, or indeed Jeremy Vine. So is this alleged lack of big names the problem? “No, the real difference is that all the Strictly pre-show gossip has been about sex, sex, sex”.

What can she mean? Perhaps it is the report calling dancer Janette Manrara a “Cuban hottie”? Maybe it’s the one saying that “Siberian siren” Kristina Rihanoff has declared that there will, for her, be “No more man eating”? Or how about the piece telling “Sexy Aljaz Skorjanec has had his nose put out of joint with the arrival of a new, uber-hunky East European, Gleb Savchenko … Savchenko is 6ft 1in of Russian gorgeousness, with abs you could bounce a penny off and a sideline as a male model”?

Maybe Ms Platell means the story that said “Earlier this year, Savchenko took part in the Russian version of Strictly with a pretty young figure skater, Adelina Sotnikova, who gave every impression of having fallen for him like a ton of bricks … He recently told a newspaper: ‘Dancing is sensual and intimate. I know there are a lot of people on the Russian show ****ing their celebrities’”.

Or perhaps it’s the paper that recycled every last photo of the female contestants and dancers in an overwhelming display of prurience. In all of those cases, Amanda Platell need look no further than her own colleagues at the Mail, because all that drivel has been published IN HER OWN PAPER. So it’s the usual hypocrisy, then.

That’s what happens when you decide to play both sides of the field. No change there.