Strictly Come Dancing begins on Saturday, and this year’s lineup is ready to go. One will win. Others will lose. Some will be bad but popular, and find themselves at the centre of a heaving maelstrom of criticism that will embarrass everyone when viewed with any amount of perspective. All will have left their partners by next Easter. Still, let’s rank this year’s Strictly crop in reverse order of perceived ability.
Simon Rimmer
Simon Rimmer is a blokey cook and best pals with Tim Lovejoy. Realistically, this means that his dancing ability cannot extend beyond biting his lip and nodding his head to the version of Speakeasy that Shed Seven rewrote for the defunct mobile phone retailer The Link in 1999. His time on Strictly will be mercifully brief.
Aston Merrygold
Aston Merrygold is probably the most accomplished dancer in this year’s lineup. He is absurdly fit and has bags of energy to spare. He’s a likeable presence, and his utter commitment to any challenge is largely what made JLS such a success. In any other show, he’d walk it. So why won’t he win Strictly? Oh, don’t make me say it. You know why, but don’t make me say it.
Joe McFadden
Joe McFadden is apparently a Holby City cast member. Does Strictly traditionally use Holby City cast members as crude filler figures whenever it fails to book a more famous contestant? Yes. Will this be reflected in McFadden’s results? Yes.
Chizzy Akudolu
Two Holby City cast members this year. Honestly, it’s almost like actual celebrities are reluctant to appear on a TV show where they’ll definitely end up getting caught cheating on their spouses.
Brian Conley
Brian Conley is the Avatar of light entertainers; he used to be a megastar, but nobody missed him when he went away. Strictly will either return him to his lofty status of old, or expedite his plunge towards total obscurity. Fun fact for millennials: if Conley talks about puppets a lot, it’s because his catchphrase used to be pointing at a puppet and saying “it’s a puppet”.
Mollie King
Frankie Bridge used to be in the Saturdays, and made the Strictly final in 2014. Rochelle Humes used to be in the Saturdays, and came last in the 2013 Strictly Christmas special. Using maths, I can deduce that Mollie King, who was also in the Saturdays, will come somewhere between these two.
Davood Ghadami
Every year, Strictly offers up one unexpected disappointment; a beautiful, athletic-looking contestant who magically transforms into a sack of potatoes on the dancefloor. This year, my money is on Ghadami to be that disappointment. The man is enormous – so enormous that sometimes it feels like an entire EastEnders department has been hired to think up reasons for him to take his top off – but his bulk might make him too inflexible to impress.
Jonnie Peacock
Jonnie Peacock is going to enjoy enormous support from the public in the coming weeks. He’s a Paralympian, so he’s already at a big physical disadvantage. But he’s fit and he’s funny, and everyone will be rooting for him. Appearing on Dancing with the Stars temporarily made people like Heather Mills, for crying out loud, so getting people onboard should be a cakewalk for Peacock.
Susan Calman
Susan Calman is close to being a national treasure, and her time on Strictly – however long it lasts – should push her over the edge. The only thing that can stop her is if her studiously unthreatening persona somehow cracks under the pressure and she ends up losing it and bludgeoning a cameraman with a brick. This, however, is unlikely.
Debbie McGee
Debbie McGee might not be much of a dancer – we just don’t know yet – but expect her to do well. The woman spent her entire life playing second fiddle to her husband, then she suffered the tragedy of losing him, and now she’s primarily being billed in the media as “magician’s widow”. The woman deserves a break.
Gemma Atkinson
This is an unproved theory, but I think Gemma Atkinson might genuinely be a Terminator. She’s conservatively 90% six-pack, I cannot ever remember hearing her speak even though she’s an actor by profession and, of all this year’s contestants, she is the one I can most vividly picture clawing her way up the boot of a speeding police car with a look of blank determination on her face. She must do well. Skynet demands it.
Alexandra Burke
Alexandra Burke is going to be on Strictly? OK dot com. Alexandra Burke has proven to be an athletic performer, both on the X Factor and in her subsequent career? OK dot com. Alexandra Burke should realistically be seen as a frontrunner in the competition? OK dot com. And yet, despite this, will she plunge out of the competition in the semi-finals because there’s something intangibly weird about her? OK dot com.
Charlotte Hawkins
Charlotte Hawkins is tougher than she looks. She’s spent countless early starts on Good Morning Britain listening to Piers Morgan spit and judder like an overfilled kettle, and to my knowledge she hasn’t punched him in the face once. This takes colossal willpower and, if she can transfer even a tenth of this to her Strictly training, she’ll do incredibly well.
Rev Richard Coles
On paper, as an older contestant who doesn’t appear to be in tremendous physical shape, Coles looks most like this year’s Ann Widdecombe. However, here’s what I keep coming back to: he used to be in The Communards. Listen to their version of Never Can Say Goodbye and tell me that anyone responsible can’t be anything but an absolute monster on the dancefloor. This year’s dark horse.
Ruth Langsford
You can feel it: the world is willing Ruth Langsford to win. It’s seen her quietly sigh and roll her eyes whenever Eamonn Holmes says anything stupid or boorish on TV, and it feels for her. It knows that Strictly is her only escape route from this hellpit of misery, and it desperately wants her to break away. And if she can do it by jeopardising her marriage by sleeping with her partner, even better.
