Soap actor Ellie Leach and her partner Vito Coppola lifted the glitterball trophy on Saturday night as the two-hour finale of Strictly Come Dancing rounded off another wonderfully emotional series.
Fellow finalists Layton Williams and Bobby Brazier put on equally impressive displays as each celebrity performed three routines with their professional partners. It was, in fact, Ellie who landed at the bottom of the token leader board after the judges doled out their marks. So, technically, we even got an underdog winner. You can’t get more Strictly than that.
In reality, Ellie was ear-marked as the favourite early on. As her partner Vito breathlessly tried to express following their win: Ellie is Strictly. She represents the ideal progression from low-confidence amateur to sizzling pro in 13 weeks. As the phenomenally talented Williams was destined to find, you can’t be the best dancer at the start because it leaves you with nowhere to go. We need a story, not just a red line on a graph pointing up.
And while Brazier also seemed to find a dazzling natural ability in a body more built for Jagger strutting than kicks and flicks, it was Ellie who captured the female-skewed audience with her fairytale-like evolution from blushing girl to self-possessed woman.
In emotional terms, sometimes the final can be like the New Year fireworks starting early at 10pm and just continuing for two hours. The high-intensity bombardment with feelings and stakes and more feelings can be a bit much. But I think last night is as close as we’ve come to a perfect Strictly final.
And this is why. By the time we reach December, every contestant is brilliant, worthy and has completed their own emotional journey to get there. There is often little to choose between them in terms of ability and skill.
Without the judges’ scores, the final ceases to be about the dancing. The only thing that matters is who the viewers love the most. And crucially, which celebrity has the most fans inclined to actually turn their sofa-based admiration into physical votes.
So much is invested, so much producing goes on behind the scenes to ensure the audience experiences so much more than just a dancing competition. What we feel when we watch the final is the only important thing.
You’ll have seen some people on social media, bemoaning the use of tense, slomo VTs of the contestants telling the cameras what winning would mean to them, how their whole lives have been building up to this one crucial moment. Enough with the padding, they cried.
But the final has to feel important, significant, the culmination of the physical and emotional investment of these contestants. They can’t just point the cameras at three dances and then twiddle their thumbs while the votes are counted.
The ceremony and pomp is vital. The dances must be looked forward to and built-up before we see them. If the routines weren’t separated by VTs of training, fans saying which celebrity they love the most and so on, it would be like eating handfuls of icing without the cake. You might think you want that, but you don’t. You want to be kept waiting.
After the potent emotion of last week’s semi-final where Annabel Croft bowed out with her partner Johannes Radebe, this week had a lot to live up to. Emotionally, producers wheeled out every big gun they had and to great effect.
Bobby reprised the dance he did in memory of his late mother while his partner Diane held it together, her own father currently receiving treatment for cancer. Layton expressed his pride at representing every young person who has ever felt different or left out as he strutted and sassed his way through three outstanding routines.
And Ellie exploded across the floor in her show dance, in dazzling white and silver, all but emerging from an actual cocoon and opening out technicolour wings at the end. The fact that she teetered slightly during her final lift only made audiences more likely to vote for her. She’s not just good, she’s human, trying and sometimes failing. We almost couldn’t have loved her more.
Whether you can see it on camera or not, the producers have done a brilliant job this year of teasing out what makes each contestant distinct and relatable and using that to give the show it’s most emotionally satisfying shape yet.
Without being too cynical, the work that goes into making us “feel” is what we really end up appreciating with Strictly. The producers tread a careful line, manipulating our hearts but never pushing it too far. Reality competitions have been through an evolution which began with that overly-mawkish X Factor fixation on dead relatives and rags-to-riches stories – something that put many of us off.
It was certainly too strong a taste for me. But the Strictly showrunners have learned where the line is and which ingredients to hold back on.
Their recipe is a successful one and one that warms us in the depths of winter like nothing else on television. Take the dancing and add the teacher/pupil relationship, the implied emotional tornadoes behind the scenes, the setbacks, the triumphs, the resilience and the emotional journeys. Get the quantities just right and it will turn out perfectly.
This year, I was left completely satisfied. Roll on September 2024.