Strictly Come Dancing’s Lessons For The Eurovision Song Contest Written by Ellie Chalkley on November 9, 2016 | 5 Comments

For the British television fans, the first hints of Autumn are a sign to take to our sofas and watch a troop of immaculately spray-tanned professional latin and ballroom dancers transform a diverse group of moderate celebrities (plus the odd big name and occasional politician) into gorgeous, lithe, rhinestone-encrusted dance superstars. Strictly Come Dancing is the BBC’s big flagship family entertainment variety show, and Strictly has a lot in common with the Eurovision Song Contest. In fact, they’ve got so much in common that it is highly unusual that the Strictly team enjoy such huge success for the BBC, while the Eurovision team struggles. Does the success of Strictly contain any secrets that could allow the BBC to regain their once-formidable Eurovision reputation?

In the Eurovision Song Contest off-season, like many UK-based Eurofans I find myself slaking my thirst for glitter and semiotically interesting light entertainment by following Strictly. It’s like National Final season every Saturday and Sunday, but without the language barriers. For the 2016 season, I’ve added to the fun by gathering together a bunch of keen Strictly fans (some of whom are also Eurofans you may recognise) to podcast about the show as it progresses.

I like to think of the ambience of Strictly as being a bit like the Song Contest of yester-year. The modern Contest is a slick global pop show that aims to dazzle with the most up-to-date performance technology available. Whereas in Strictly you might have a spangled garden bench, a plastic horse (although I guess Rambo Amadeus did have that donkey), a medium-sized dragon, and occasionally some really freaky puppets. The most impressive thing you can do in Strictly is be lowered from the ceiling, which I think is a gimmick that hasn’t yet been done in Eurovision, but it’s surely only a matter of time. Sadly for fans of the Eurovision drinking game, there is much less pyro in Strictly – which is possibly something to do with the flammability of the costumes and the amount of hairspray?

Instead, we drink when Head Judge Len awards a score of ‘severrrn’. Or when Ed Balls is… Ed Balls.

Strictly Come Dancing And The Variety Show Format

The basic mechanics of both shows are quite similar: every year we gather together an array of performers, who then commit an artistic performance live on television. It is then judged on competency and artistic merit by a panel of judges who deliver scores, and also viewers at home who deliver ranked phone votes. At the end of the process, the votes are tallied and a winner is declared.

Even some of the problems with the formats are similar. In both shows we now have producer-led running orders, which leaves the show open to accusations of practicing the Dark Arts of TV production in order to manipulate the public vote. While the producers of the Eurovision Song Contest say that the aim is to produce the most entertaining television program and the running order does not affects the outcome, we at ESC Insight don’t necessarily agree. When I spoke to TV betting expert (and friend of the parish) Rob Furber, he was able to expand on the level of manipulation possible by merely switching people around in the running order and having the judges talk one couple down or another couple up.

The Running Order Impact

From analysing the results, it’s apparent that on Strictly, performing late on in the running order gives an advantage in both the public vote and the judges scores, but the televisual argument for this is that in building an entertaining show, you naturally place your most exciting ‘headline acts’ at the very climax of the show. In both shows, the absolute fairness of the competitive process has been somewhat compromised in order to produce a more compelling piece of entertainment. This is fine, until a running order question in Eurovision turns into an international diplomatic incident or the BBC finds itself under political fire from its critics in commercial media for being seen to be manipulating a result through running order jiggery pokery, or as has been the case early in this season, an unfortunate series of eliminations results in accusations of racism.

We’ve also got scoring transparency that isn’t really transparent. The BBC never release details of the weekly televote (because you can easily predict the overall winner if you’re privy to these numbers) and while the Song Contest releases televote results that break down each country’s vote as a rank, we’re still unclear about the raw numbers and other interesting things like the methods used to combat power-voting and produce votes for those nations who cannot produce a valid televote.

In the Song Contest, we’re provided with the rubric that should determine how the acts are ranked – although the Great Jury Room Periscope Scandal of 2016 casts doubt on whether the rubric is being followed exactly. The rubric goes like this:

“Each jury member will rank all the songs in the show by judging each song, each jury member will focus on the vocal capability of the artists, the performance on stage, the composition and originality of the song, and the overall impression by the act.”

In Strictly we’ve got no such guidelines, leading to judges scoring that can seem arbitrary, that varies from week to week and that sometimes seems at odds with the comments from that particular judge. The BBC could certainly learn from the judging process at Eurovision by clarifying what level of performance is represented by which score and sharing with the public any guidelines the judges are using.

Although elements of the Eurovision voting process rely on security through obscurity, it is one of the most open and accountable public votes in reality TV.

Who Knows The Rules?

The recent Strictly kerfuffle involving an elimination dance-off between contestants Melvin and Anastacia also made me extremely grateful for our extensive knowledge of how the Eurovision Song Contest deals with edge cases, disturbances and tied scores. We know that if anything goes wrong during the live shows at Eurovision, like an external disturbance or technical problem, then the artist gets a repeat attempt (something that will still be memorable to everyone in the hall for the 2016 Semi Final 2 Jury show where everyone heard the Georgian entry four times before they got the complex video effects right) or if an artist is unable to sing live then they are forced to withdraw – Molly Smitten-Downes came up against this when she was reportedly struggling with her voice in 2014.

Because the rules of Strictly are not made public (although we’re still trying to get them) we can be surprised and confused by the way that the program deals with things like Anastacia’s injury and Will Young’s withdrawal from the contest. Eurovision clearly wins out here – we know exactly what happens in almost all situations, because we can consult the public rulebook.

The Tradecraft And Production Skills

Is it true that the qualities required to make Strictly are the same ones you need to make a good Eurovision Song Contest entry?

Strictly has that combination of skilled performers, glitzy spectacle and clever visual storytelling that you are all very familiar with in May. Which means We can probably draw some lines between aspects of the stagecraft that Strictly falls down on and the enduring mystery of the lack of UK success.

In Strictly, there’s a huge variability in the quality of the match between choreography and camerawork.  Sometimes a flash of inspiration seems to hit the team and you get the full gamut of storytelling framing techniques – like the depth of field work and bokeh in Kevin & Louise’s Viennese waltz this year, but sometimes we’re shown a very stage-bound presentation of a dance, filmed from exactly the same distance throughout and occasionally even missing huge technical dance moments or throwing away the emotional climax of a dance by cutting away from a dancer’s face at exactly the wrong moment.

No doubt some of this is the combination of rapid-turnarounds and live TV. In Eurovision, we know that the staging and camerawork is determined months in advance, practiced with stand-ins and then perfected over the two weeks of final rehearsals. In Strictly, we know that they have much less time to work on the visual storytelling. The show’s director gets training footage and suggested camera angles on the Tuesday or Wednesday, giving them 2 or 3 days to build the dance elements of the show. The combination of the live band and slightly unpredictable celebrities means that even the best camera crew in the world are occasionally going to miss their shot.

It’s Camp And Ironic

Both Strictly and the Contest have a strong element of kitsch and camp in their makeup. Both shows have an escapist quality, and create a separate world of extravagant costuming and makeup, huge stage sets and the drama of competitive performance. Both shows have also now started to acknowledge their own tropes – the two recent Swedish hosted contests poked amiable fun at Eurofans, Sweden, Eurovision languages, the people presenting the jury votes and in the interval act, threatened to dissolve the contest from within with a musical number that was basically a highly entertaining laundry-list of Eurovision tropes.

Yes, this is another threadbare excuse to embed Love Love Peace Peace.

Strictly shows us that it too knows how daft a programme it is by introducing elements that add ironic distance. As a show, they’re aware that they aren’t just being watched by ballroom dancing fans, but also by snarky 30-somethings on Twitter, small kids who like slapstick, and older, more traditional viewers. They’re doing this by including small changes like adding the wild, occasionally strange humour of Claudia Winkleman hosting alongside serious, totally unironic Tess Daly, hamming up the reading of the very serious terms and conditions for the televote ,and adding in increasingly elaborate ‘training montages’ that have more to do with establishing a soapy storyline or emotive pull factor than showing anyone actually doing dance training.

The Blackpool Tower Ballroom (image: Michael Beckwith/Wikimedia CC)

They’re also both shows where a tremendous amount of money is spent. It’s not a totally fair comparison, but the BBC spend about £400,000 on its annual contribution towards the Contest (which gets them a bare minimum of seven hours of high-quality entertainment) and while the BBC has never confirmed the cost of Strictly, a reasonable estimate would be between £750,000 and £1 million per weekend. Granted, they’re actually making a whole show for that amount of money, but Eurovision definitely looks like a bargain next to that.

In terms of spin-offs and associated programming, the Strictly model could definitely be rolled out to Eurovision.The ‘It Takes Two’ magazine show format (which makes great use of existing celebrity bookings and has an anarchic, camp atmosphere all of its own) could be rolled over into a Eurovision daily update during the two weeks of the contest – the BBC Three online platform would be an ideal place for younger presenters to host a fun, chatty magazine show which combines talking to whichever Eurovision performers, songwriters or tech crew happen to be around with rehearsal clips and mini documentary clips about Kyiv and what it takes for the contest to come together (you mean some sort of daily Eurovision Insight? – Ewan).

It’s certainly the kind of content that many community sites are already doing, but the cachet of the show going out on a BBC platform would certainly make it easier to get artist bookings. Also, it would provide Contest related content that could easily be reused by other BBC properties.

Thinking back to the glory days of the post-Contest chat show content ‘Liquid Eurovision’ with Lorraine Kelly, even if it’s online only, a strand like this has the potential for creating either a magical resource for Eurofans or a hugely entertaining TV car-crash. Potentially a bit of both.

The Impact on Popular Music

For the BBC, Strictly is one of the last places that pop music is promoted to a mass audience. Occasionally Dave Arch and his wonderful wonderful Orchestra can appear to struggle with very up to the minute pop songs (although they did do a superb arrangement of Rihanna & Calvin Harris’s ‘We Found Love‘, complete with incredible drop), but there’s also the slot in the Sunday elimination show where a pop artist performs to playback with a routine by the pros. The Sunday pop performance is the part of Strictly which looks most like a BBC Eurovision routine and it very often makes the same mistakes.

The artist is often selected from the ‘safe Radio 2’ pool of heritage acts (this year we’ve had a Bee Gee, Michael Ball, and Madness) and is often not even an A-listed track on Radio 2. The emphasis on getting a recognisable name to sing a very inoffensive song means that what could be a real creative high point of the content-light results show is often the bit where you go and make a cup of tea.

In Week 5 of this year’s series, the featured artist was Leanne Rimes, singing her very downtempo new ballad, How To Kiss A Boy. That song was only on the Radio 2 B-list. However, sitting in the Radio 2 A-list for the same week was Melanie C, who surely has more instant name recognition than Leanne Rimes. Melanie C’s new song ‘Anymore‘ is a bit more modern and dancey than Leanne Rimes’ trad ballad, and while it might potentially not go down well with the older end of the Strictly audience, I’d be willing to put up with a certain amount of harrumphing in order to keep the energy level of the show up.

They’ve also missed a trick in not getting Strictly double alumnus Sophie Ellis-Bextor (and many Eurofan’s perennial fantasy UK representative as long as she duets with Bristolian legends Hacksaw) to come in and sing her recent single, the up-tempo, disco-flavoured ‘Come With Us‘, which I can just see the pros doing a really glitzy cha cha cha to.

In the past decade, this attitude of a safe Radio 2-friendly focus-grouped song and stagebound performances has been the hallmark of the UK’s Eurovision entries.

I’ve long had a theory that it is impossible for the BBC to win Eurovision while they don’t make a prime-time mass audience pop music program. The BBC techniques in filming pop performances have fallen well behind the times as a result of the lack of exposure to pop music in anything other than a ‘live in session’ format. The Strictly Sunday night pop music slot shows what the BBC Light Entertainment team think is what goes down well in terms of televised pop, and I think that the attitude that ‘this is sufficiently inoffensive that none of us will get any complaints’ is unfortunately visible.

Keep Dancing?

Overall, the success of Strictly shows us that the BBC have the experience and tradecraft necessary to put together a really spectacular show, if they so choose. The only thing lacking in the BBC’s contribution to Eurovision is a will to take risks and create something with a memorable edge. This might mean causing some uncomfortable feelings as some key demographics catch up with 21st century entertainment, and it might mean a few sneery opinion pieces in the usual right wing papers, but it would still be the right thing to do. Our creatives should be free to innovate, even in the fields of mass-market light entertainment.

Strictly also demonstrates that the BBC are also clearly aware of the tricks used in putting together reality TV stories and how you can shape them.  They’re aware that a reality TV audience needs to see that events are forming a narrative in order to be motivated to pick up the phone and vote. They’re even aware that the tropes and foibles of a show can be acknowledged to provide a show that works on multiple levels for multiple audiences.

All the puzzle pieces are there – the BBC team just need to show the Eurovision Song Contest as much love as they show Strictly Come Dancing.