‘If you were to die and come back as a person or thing,” Vanity Fair wonders this month of the great Jim Broadbent, “what do you think it would be?” “Probably stationery,” replies Broadbent.
Well, quite. On the off-chance that even a thousandth of the crazy shit Shirley MacLaine’s been claiming for years is accurate, we’re still all going to be reincarnated as fruit flies or whatever. But I need to put it on record that, in the event I am given the choice, I would like to come back as any form of high-camp “bad boy”.
The fictional apogee of this is Blades of Glory’s Chazz Michael Michaels – figure skating’s bad boy – but, in real life, the ultimate is the rich tradition of the “tennis bad boy”. For me, that’s the dream – the look, the hilarious context of the sport, the attempt to go full Jimmy Dean with a form of referee who looks as if he’s on day release from a barbershop choir. I couldn’t be more here for the likes of tennis outlaw Nick Kyrgios, whose on-court dramatics consistently suggest that, at some point, he’ll be expelled from the tour in disgrace and end up wasting his talent servicing Riviera hedge fund wives and drinking pastis, at least until he’s scouted down and recruited by the CIA to infiltrate North Korea as Kim Jong-un’s backhand coach.
Anyhow … coming a close second this week to the tennis bad boy is the Strictly bad boy. In case you missed this, dancer Brendan Cole has parted company with the BBC’s top-rated show, in the biggest ballroom hoo-ha since the Pan Pacifics were rigged in favour of Ken Railings and Tina Sparkle. “It’s quite, actually, hard to talk about,” explained Brendan in a media outing he’d booked specifically to talk about it. “The BBC haven’t renewed my contract.”
As the Sun had it: “Strictly Come Dancing bosses have axed bad boy Brendan Cole because of his huge ego and difficult behaviour.” The Express wondered: “Will Strictly Come Dancing Survive without its favourite bad boy Brendan Cole?” An explainer in the Bolton News explained: “He’s known as the bad boy of Strictly.” Erstwhile judge Arlene Phillips confirmed to Good Morning Britain: “He has always been the bad boy,” adding later: “He’s the bad boy of dance.”
So there you have it. No one’s bigger than the club, as Alex Ferguson used to remind somewhat more convincing bad boys. As for how Brendan’s ballroom bad boy story arc will proceed from here, there is obviously the talent wasting/Riviera wives/pastis option. Then again, we absolutely shouldn’t rule him out of becoming a dance instructor at a Catskill mountains resort, sparking a chain of events that will ultimately see him becoming husband and consort to the US’s first female president. If 15 years of this ballroom bad boy have taught us anything, it’s that no one puts Brendan in the corner.
