BBC iPlayer can be a double-edged sword. On one hand it has freed us all from the tyranny of television schedules, but on the other it means you now have a month to watch Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme. A whole month to chance upon this fermented kaleidoscope of dung. A whole month to watch it while your brain involuntarily smashes against the inside of your skull in a frantic bid for damage limitation. A whole month to send the link to all your friends to make sure it actually exists and you’re not just having a psychotic episode.
Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme is bad. It’s I Love My Country bad. It’s – and I know this is basically invoking the Godwin’s law of light entertainment, but in this instance it’s warranted – Don’t Scare the Hare bad. Everyone deserves to watch at least some of it.
It begins with Len Goodman, the 73-year-old former Strictly Come Dancing judge, rapping. The opening titles sound like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, had that show been about Will Smith being beaten into a state of concussion during that one little fight that scared his mom. “I’ve been rapping since a very young man”, Len half-chuckles in that gor-blimey-what-am-I-like way of his, before adding, “but that was cockney rhyming slang”. I haven’t memorised the lyrics, by the way. They’re laser-etched into my brain now. They’re all I hear at night. They’re why I can’t sleep any more.
As the programme wears on, it becomes tragically apparent that nobody has given any of this a solitary moment of thought. Not the producers, who wrongly equate compelling television with a gameshow round where a man looks at a cartoon of the sun having a run then says “the sun having a run”. Not the celebrity guests, who spend the duration of the show waiting to be told this is all an elaborate prank. And not Len Goodman, a man so unaccustomed to autocue that every new word takes him by such surprise that you end up worrying for his heart.
By the time Goodman initiates an impromptu dance break by bending over and touching his bum, you’ll be confused. By the time he introduces a segment called News at Len by waggling his hands around in a weird approximation of a surfer’s “hang loose” gesture, you’ll feel dizzy. By the end, when the actual answer to one of the real questions is “Dawn French and Judi Dench painting a bench”, you’ll be longing for the comparatively tranquil days of that series where Len Goodman shouted at Ainsley Harriott for not giving him any chips to eat.
Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme is bad. If it wasn’t for Cheap Cheap Cheap’s inexplicable appearance last week, it might honestly be the worst new television programme of the year. Hand on heart, it could run for another five decades and I couldn’t bring myself to watch another second of it. But here’s the weird thing: I’m glad it exists.
Saturday evening television has fallen into a terrible hole in the last few years. The rise of The X Factor, and, to a lesser extent, Strictly, means that producers now have a lock-tight template of what works. Everything is a knockout competition – a singing competition, a dancing competition, a choral competition, a dating competition, a gymnastic competition – and they’re all utterly interchangeable. The studios are equally cavernous. The hosts all fulfil the same role. The judges each offer the same mix of personalities and cadences. To watch most Saturday night telly in 2017 is to watch a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, designed by committee and watered down to a homeopathic level.
In comparison, Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme looks like an individual vision gone haywire. It looks like it was first pitched by a squeaky-voiced blackmailer in a curly wig who crashed in through a window then vanished in a puff of smoke. None of it makes any sense. Everyone is so determined to have fun at all costs that it actually makes you anxious. It is the worst kind of mess. It’s a toddler drawing shapes in a puddle of vomit. And yet, simply by dint of the fact that it exists, it’s better than something like Pitch Battle. It’s a botched roll of the dice, but a botched roll is still a roll. Surely it’s better to take a leap and land on your arse than not take a leap at all.
Television needs more shows like Len Goodman’s Partners in Rhyme. None of us need to watch them, obviously, but that’s beside the point.
