Strictly Come Dancing hit a season high on Saturday evening with almost 10 million people tuning in to BBC1 for its fourth weekend, featuring another jaw-dropping performance from Ed Balls.
Almost half the TV viewing public watched Balls and fellow celebrity contestants including model Daisy Lowe, newsreader Naga Munchetty and singer Louise Redknapp.
Balls performed a paso doble to Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero while dressed as a knight – described by the Guardian liveblog as “the campest paso I’ve ever seen”, with Balls “prancing around like a Lidl Chippendale”.
For the third week running, judges were unimpressed with the former shadow chancellor’s moves, placing him at the bottom of the leaderboard. He has consistently received the lowest scores from the judges, only for audience votes – announced on Sunday evening – to save him from a dance-off and possible elimination.
Saturday’s show peaked at 10.8 million viewers and had an average of 9.8 million, up from 9.6 million last week, when a green-faced Balls performed a salsa as The Mask.
Strictly has consistently outperformed ITV rival The X Factor, whose audience on Saturday dipped to an average of 5.8 million, from 6.2 million the previous week.
Balls, who lost his parliamentary seat in 2015, said last week he found waiting for the results of the public vote more tense than election night because contestants were given no advance warning of the result.
The continued survival of Balls despite his inability to impress the judges has not been the only piece of controversy in the 14th series of Strictly. Last week, the singer Will Young dropped out citing personal reasons, and the elimination of two out of three black contestants on the show has prompted allegations of racism.
Following the departures of EastEnders actor Tameka Empson and DJ Melvin Odoom, the BBC defended the show, saying: “Judges judge the dancing and the dancing alone, not anything else.”
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