The BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing scandal, like the programme itself, is an enduring one because it taps into our human fascination with the gap between illusion and reality. A performance is just that. Something else is always going on.
The “Strictly curse” joke used to be that what was going on was that the “couples” paired by the show got on a little too well – better than they admitted — to the detriment of their pre-existing, real-life partners. We now know that several contestants on Strictly have had a very different experience and were put in situations in which they should never have been put.
We should have known this eight years ago, which was the year Irish television presenter Laura Whitmore says she was “gaslit” to make the treatment she received from her professional partner, Giovanni Pernice, in the training room “seem normalised”.
Whitmore’s interview with The Irish Times, in which she made this comment, has been picked up by multiple UK outlets, including the BBC itself, since it was published on Saturday. It follows an Instagram statement in which she said she “initially raised concerns” about the “inappropriate” behaviour she encountered when competing on the show in 2016.
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The outcome of a BBC internal review into the programme has yet to be published at the time of writing, but it seems reasonable to think that if Whitmore’s concerns had been dealt with sufficiently at that time, the BBC would not have ended up in the position it is in now.
Instead, the story was allowed to gain traction after actor Amanda Abbington consulted legal advice about her experience with Pernice on the 2023 series, and the law firm contacted the BBC, citing “numerous serious complaints” about his conduct. Pernice quit the show but denied “any suggestion of abusive or threatening behaviour”.
The scandal then escalated when BBC investigators, apparently tipped off by Strictly production staff, were shown footage of a second professional dancer, Graziano Di Prima, physically and verbally abusing his partner, former Love Island contestant Zara McDermott. He was promptly axed.
[ Laura Whitmore alleges ‘inappropriate behaviour’ during Strictly stintOpens in new window ]
McDermott said she had not complained because she was scared — rationally, given the treatment meted out online to Abbington — about a public backlash, her future and victim shaming.
Another account that shouldn’t be forgotten came from Paralympian table tennis player Will Bayley, who said his time on the 2019 series left him with injuries that still affect him now. He said he was encouraged to do a jump in practice that he did not want to do.
Bayley thought his dance partner, Janette Manrara, was “under a lot of pressure by the bosses to perform a certain way”, and that it was this pressure that left him in “horrific pain”. He also said there was “no duty of care” from the BBC.
One of the obvious questions raised by these damaging testimonies is that if people with a certain level of profile, who are reportedly paid a flat fee of £25,000 (€29,000), are at risk of mistreatment on a relentlessly successful show like Strictly, if they don’t always feel enabled to complain and if they’re not necessarily listened to when they do, what protections do “civilian” participants in other reality television have?
A member of the public who is plucked from thousands of applications to appear on a TV show is vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation almost by default. They are automatically on the wrong end of an imbalance of power.
As viewers, we tacitly know this. During The X Factor or original Big Brother eras, for example, it was a useful starting assumption. And yet some recent accounts of what went on behind the scenes of the reality television machine have still managed to shock.
BBC director general Tim Davie has apologised to Strictly contestants who “had an experience that hasn’t been wholly positive”, saying there are “limits” to competitiveness and “lines that should never be crossed”. Chaperones have been introduced for all training sessions, while it will employ two new “welfare producers”, one for the celebrities and one for the professionals.
But Davie has been somewhat busier lately with another crisis, one that also involves power imbalances, duty-of-care issues and an approach to handling complaints that is, at best, ineffective.
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On Friday, he met UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy to discuss the BBC’s knowledge of the arrest of Huw Edwards last November and why it continued to pay him until he resigned in April. Edwards pleaded guilty last week to three counts of making indecent images of children and he will be sentenced in September.
This extraordinarily dismal fall-from-grace case is, of course, completely separate from events at Strictly Come Dancing. Any BBC hopes of avoiding damaging spillover from the criminality of its former “star” news presenter to its own reputation now looks shot, however.
Allegations that Edwards sent inappropriate messages to three junior members of BBC staff, first reported by Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire in July 2023, have been joined by a new report in the Sunday Times that the BBC paid for the therapy of a member of the public who complained about Edwards, but then retracted her complaints.
Both this story, still a potential resignation matter for Davie, and the Strictly saga raise uncomfortable questions about how the BBC manages crises. Media organisations are some of the most scrutinised in the world. This scrutiny likely encourages counterproductive instincts to try to make problems go away, or deny that there is a problem at all. A brutal “show must go on” culture beds in.
On screen, there are knowing references to “the cult of Strictly”. But it’s the cult of the BBC that has surfaced here, and it’s not pretty.
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