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    Strictly 2018

    BBC announce first "celebrity" contestant for this year's SCD. Someone called Katie Piper.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45168010

    So, that's 0/1 so far for the "have I heard of them?" count. Normally I'm familiar with around 3, maybe 4 of the 14 or 15 contestants, and sort of half-know one or possibly two others (i.e. at least recognise the name as somebody who I know is a celeb, though not necessarily what they do).

    #2
    I do know of her, but I find the number I'm very or even tangentially familiar with is slowly dropping year-on-year, and I'd be surprised if that proved to alter this time around.

    Of course, to us longer-term viewers (of the show or of culture in general) it's the case that the 'nexus' of current fame is moving further and further away from our reference points as time goes on. It's also partly a consequence of bigger names having been 'used up' in previous series, so there's a gradual but perceptible increase in barrel-scraping: something I think is going to be inevitably common to all formats like this. There's also perhaps a resultant downward spiral in the prestige of going on it that's become self-reinforcing.

    Partly, too, it seems to be the universal trend of the general qualification for "celebrity" shifting ever further downwards. If you consider that what we might call the Reality TV Era began(?) in summer 2000 with the original Big Brother, we've now had 18 years of 'ordinary' people becoming famous just for appearing on TV as themselves. And throughout that time there's been an ever greater density of people appearing on one show purely on the basis of having got famous thanks to appearing on another one. Strictly seems barely more immune to this these days than any of the shonkier formats doing the rounds.

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      #3
      (I always think the tipping point was that earlyish Celebrity Big Brother where the gimmick was to introduce a 'normal' person into the house – wasn't it Chantelle whatsername, soon to be the catalyst for the infamous Ordinary Boys' Preston Never Mind The Buzzcocks incident? – but pretend to the other denizens that she was famous for something. At the time it seemed a humorously self-referential or even self-mocking idea to send up the nature of celebrity. Then, though, she ended up winning the series, and in so doing instantly morphed into an actual 'celebrity' after all... and the Rubicon had been crossed.

      There must be reality-show contestants nowadays who literally can't remember the milieu being any other way. Soon we'll be getting contestants who weren't even born when the original BB aired – the only one I've ever watched, back when the participants really were normal and it resembled a genuine social experiment. Sigh.)

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        #4
        Katie Piper is a model/TV presenter who was badly disfigured in an acid attack by her ex-boyfriend. Since then she's rebuilt her life / face / career and according to Mrs P is a hugely interesting and positive person who has fought back from a career/life threatening incident.

        I saw her on BBC Breakfast and under the lights / makeup said "Fucking hell, she looks a bit shiny and plastic" before realising who it was. So, yeah, score one for the social faux pas right there.

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          #5
          Bloody hell! Sounds as if I ought to have heard of her even though I hadn't. Horrendous story, but amazing what's she's managed since. Hope the scum who did that to her rot in hell.

          More info on her Wiki page about what looks like an interesting post-attack career: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Piper

          Edit: and what amazing achievements by the doctors in charge of her care. it's difficult to believe from the way she looks now just how unimaginably awful the damage apparently was immediately after the attack.
          Last edited by Evariste Euler Gauss; 13-08-2018, 15:28.

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            #6
            Yeah, one of those moments where the reflex reaction of "Oh God, not another non-entity in a reality TV show" isn't really justified.

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              #7
              Indeed.

              2nd and 3rd announcements: Faye Tozer and Danny John-Jules. 0/3 for me, though, to be fair, I've often thought "I must get round to giving Red Dwarf a go some time soon''. Not so much "must give Steps' music a go".

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                #8
                Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                Yeah, one of those moments where the reflex reaction of "Oh God, not another non-entity in a reality TV show" isn't really justified.
                No, I'd certainly not direct ire at her, per se. Save that for the 4th announcement, who is a "YouTube celebrity" vlogger. What was I saying about Rubicons being crossed?

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                  #9
                  Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                  Indeed.

                  2nd and 3rd announcements: Faye Tozer and Danny John-Jules. 0/3 for me, though, to be fair, I've often thought "I must get round to giving Red Dwarf a go some time soon''. Not so much "must give Steps' music a go".
                  My first instinct was to wonder if Faye Tozer had the full song-and-dance training before she began her pop career. That sort of thing doesn't always translate to the Strictly stage, but it can't hurt.

                  Danny John-Jules, though, was a professional friggin' dancer originally, before he ever tried acting. When he auditioned for the Cat in Red Dwarf, he got the part because he'd read Desmond Morris' Catwatching before the interview to get into the feline mindset, turned up in a flash '70s suit of his dad's to further suit the character, and also crucially because the dude can move. Which all seems a trifle unfair, as he's hardly starting from a base of complete dancefloor incompetence, but I'd really look forward to seeing what he can do.

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                    #10
                    Well, 0/4 for me, of course. I guess my total bewilderment at the vlogging phenomenon is an indication both of how I'm ageing and of how fast the world is changing. {btw, had a wobble in my spelling confidence there, as I couldn't see why "ageing" and "changing" have different approaches to dropping or not dropping the "e", but my instinct was right and I was just over-thinking it).

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                      #11
                      Danny John-Jules? Woo-hoo! I've heard of one!

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                        #12

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                          #13

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                            #14
                            Also on Death in Paradise now. I remember him from clubs in the 80s and yes, he is a dancer.

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                              #15
                              So was Debbie McGee and she was on last year.

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                                #16
                                Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                {btw, had a wobble in my spelling confidence there, as I couldn't see why "ageing" and "changing" have different approaches to dropping or not dropping the "e", but my instinct was right and I was just over-thinking it).
                                It's one of those words I always second-guess myself over when I'm typing, too. I think there's transatlantic differences over spellings like aging/ageing and sizable/sizeable that mean one sees both used, and this does mean that my confidence in which should be the 'correct' spelling gets undermined. For example my browser/this editor has red-lined 'ageing' and 'sizeable' there, but I'm fairly certain they're correct in British English.

                                Hmm, my Collins dictionary lists both spellings for either word here. I think the rule of thumb I broadly stick to is that if one drops the E and it seems to create a word that 'reads' wrong – e.g. 'sizable' looks a bit too much like it should be pronounced "sizzable" – then I'll keep the E. I flip-flop on whether 'aging' reads too much like "agging"...

                                Meanwhile, my go-to online guide is Grammarist.com's articles, e.g. Ageing vs. aging – this suggests that the dropped-E variants are the North American standard, whereas the retained-E variants are the rest of the English-speaking world's correct form. There's a very cogent discussion there in among the more reactionary comments.

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                                  #17
                                  Jesus. Can't they hold off until the end of September/beginning of October to announce this shit? At least until after the Proms has finished.
                                  It's a Winter programme. Why remind us of that awful state of affairs while it's still summer?

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                                    #18
                                    Very good point, hobbes. I was thrown when I saw here that they'd started announcing them already.


                                    Originally posted by MsD View Post
                                    Also on Death in Paradise now. I remember him from clubs in the 80s and yes, he is a dancer.
                                    Red Dwarf aside, his other key role while I was growing up was as Barrington in the deeply wonderful Maid Marian and her Merry Men:

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                                      #19
                                      Now what a programme that was. Happy Bloopy, all.

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                                        #20
                                        It's a Winter programme.
                                        Well, it's an autumn programme, of course. The launch show is usually the first Saturday in September, and the first competitive dances 3 weeks after that, in the fourth weekend of September. All over just before Christmas. I take the point that it's not very "summery" and the annoucements feel a bit "summer's snding now", but then so does the start of the football league season. And frankly so do the shortening evenings and the suddenly crappy wet and cool British weather that has been with us for just over a week now.

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                                          #21
                                          Capital Radio DJ Vick Hope. 0/5.

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                                            #22
                                            Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                            Capital Radio DJ Vick Hope. 0/5.
                                            https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45168010

                                            1/6?

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                                              #23
                                              Why is it called Strictly?

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                                                #24
                                                The full title is Strictly Come Dancing, which is a mixture of an old BBC dance competition called Come Dancing and the Australian film Strictly Ballroom.

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                                                  #25
                                                  Which gets shortened to just Strictly – which makes perfect sense when you know what it's referring to, but yes makes none whatsoever to anyone encountering it for the first time as that loses the entire context.

                                                  Come Dancing, which was a televised ballroom dancing competition for actual ballroom dancers rather than celebs, ran for something like 50 years until the late 1990s, though it was decades past its heyday by then. Even after its eventual demise, the name and concept was so ingrained in British culture (if nothing else, its sheer longevity was legendary) it clearly made perfect sense to the BBC in 2004 to resurrect it for the modern-day programme. But I confess I would never have though Baz Luhrmann's 1987(?) film Strictly Ballroom held enough cultural currency in 21st-century Britain to have been worth borrowing part of its title for the mashup. At the time the Beeb had no idea the show was going to be so instantly mega-popular ("Ballroom dancing? With celebrities? On Saturday-night primetime BBC 1? What are you smoking?"), yet it was an immediate huge hit – and one sign of this was how the name got shortened colloquially, pretty much from the off, to just the first word.

                                                  It's been front-and-centre on the BBC since 2004, and has eclipsed its predecessor to such an extent in the popular consciousness there's doubtless an entire generation grown up with it who've never heard of Come Dancing (or indeed Strictly Ballroom) but have never thought to question the rather odd moniker. When they sold the format overseas, of course, the more dully prosaic but unquestionably more descriptive Dancing With The Stars got substituted instead though.

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