Amanda and Giovanni

[CombatLingerie]

Apologies if there is already a thread but I couldn’t find one. What on earth has gone on between Amanda Abbington and Giovanni Pernice during Strictly?AA is apparently taking legal action against the BBC claiming she has PTSD.

I kind of wonder about this angle too.

The production company encourages and feeds gossip and tabloid rumours which obviously improves money and viewers and ratings and boosts Gio's career.

And of course we all know which gender will get judged and shamed more from gossip about flings, etc.

That complaint from Laura Whitmore was along those lines.

She was there to train professionally and put the work in

but the managers insisted she get all dressed up and accompany Gio to red carpet events to be photographed so everyone could gossip and speculate about the "Strictly curse".

And it then "looks like" she's there consensually and people judge her, when she's been TOLD to be there.

I can see AA as an older TERFy woman saying "fuck no, I've got a partner, I'm here to dance and I'm not being manipulated this way" and the daggers coming out as a result.

And all these rumours created are spiteful and sexist and stereotyped - Laura Whitmore is a blonde attractive woman in a dress so of course she's promiscuous and a man-eater.

AA would be portrayed as a desperate older woman trying to get a new man (with photos of her partner in a wheelchair contrasted with Gio, and snide comments mocking her commitment to her partner).

Its like the pp said about the treatment of Philip Schofield (vs Ant and Dec).

Once the media have decided they want someone torn down and "witch burnt" for profit that's it.

I think it was Melanie Sykes who wrote about how production companies - once they know someone is vulnerable or unstable, they go all in to ruin their lives and set them up (so they'd really wind her up, then show footage of her "having a tantrum on camera").

Or Caroline Flack - she may have been a bit volatile at times but they KNEW this and chose to go for her even more.

It is not paranoid to consider that an organisation full of passionate TQ+ supporters might have made a decision that was in part designed to punish someone gender critical, due to the decision being in part made by people who wanted to see her punished. It would be paranoid if I said this is what did happen, or probably happened, but to consider it possible is nothing more than being open minded.

Given there was a campaign to stop her getting on the show it's hardly impossible that the campaigned continued quietly int he background after she joined. I also suspect that the people working on Strictly veer towards the "be kind, so open minded their brains have fallen out" end of the spectrum compared to some other programmes.

I saw all 4 dances - she looked like she was having a great time and adored Gio. May even have had the hot for him adored😚😗

I'm not going to speculate on this situation because it's just nasty gossip and speculation at this stage but it does amuse me to know that the google psychologists banging on about PTSD are probably the same whiners who like to insist on every person disagreeing with them/being mean to them being a 'narc' and whose 'anxiety is through the roof' when they break a nail 🙄

You do realize she is an ACTOR, and that a dance on Strictly is a performance (which includes an element of acting) for the purpose of entertaining the audience?

I was told by a dance teacher in London - when Strictly was first getting going, so this may have changed - that the celebs have several weeks of intensive basic training with experienced instructors before they get anywhere near the pros; he was one of them. And he was lovely, really kind and patient, made me feel I was dancing when in fact he was just incredibly skilled at steering a bag of spuds round the floor. I can imagine the shock of moving from that atmosphere to a professional dancer's expectations must be pretty sobering.

Does anyone else remember bullying allegations way back when, when it was all fields…? It was a male pro and an excellent celeb. He was shouting as though she was a pro at a show rehearsal.

You know that classic scene where the leader bellows ‘higher, higher, smile, snap snap snap…’ and so on. Like recruiting for cheerleaders type of pressure.

It may possibly have been Brendon in his early days.

If you can’t see the irony in saying your conspiracy theory is being open minded to the possibility @AnonnyMouseDave but people at the BBC are so open minded their brains have fallen out then I don’t know what to say.

AA has not been targeted by a shadowy cabal of TRA at the BBC or a witch hunt because she’s an older woman as someone else who thinks this is a GC targeting has said.

She is not someone who thrives under the pressure of performing live or handling the consequences of the fallout in the best way.

That’s far more likely the case here than the BBC colluding in picking her to be the target of public humiliation via one of their own employees.

AA has not been targeted by a shadowy cabal of TRA at the BBC or a witch hunt because she’s an older woman as someone else who thinks this is a GC targeting has said.

I don’t think it’s that overt but I can totally believe there are people working on Strictly (which must be a LOT of people in total) who do have it in for her for that reason and could have made things more difficult for her. I don’t know what the views of most of the pros and other celebs are, but they are a demographic that’s highly likely to swallow gender ideology and believe that anyone who questions it is “transphobic” and a bad person, rather than having a detailed understanding of the equality act, Maya ruling and feminist gender theory. I’m sure not all of them but I’m equally sure some of them are more on the TRA than the GC side. And whether anyone deliberately set out to bully her or not, it could have led to a situation where she felt, or was, ostracised or gossiped about/called a transphobic etc.

I am not a fan of hers and didn’t warm to her as I’ve said, but even if she has her own issues or is difficult to work with (not saying she definitely does, but others are), that doesn’t preclude the gender issue being used against her or making some people hate her, which would definitely make the whole experience harder.

But surely the pro (Gio in this case) is even more likely to be vulnerable to manipulation by the beeb as he has less power than the celeb?

AA has not been targeted by a shadowy cabal of TRA at the BBC or a witch hunt because she’s an older woman as someone else who thinks this is a GC targeting has said.

We have certainly seen this behaviour other organisations though the TRA cabal is hardly shadowy. Organisations like the civil service and the arts council. More and more men and winning are winning harassment and discrimination cases caused by TRAs.

Not sure what this proves? All I take from that video is that a long time before she left the show she made a slightly weird and inconvincing video downplaying the idea of a rift. I don't know why she made the video, how honest she was being, whether she had been "encouraged" to make it (not impossible especially given the tone) and what has happened on changed since the vid was made. She might have been struggling a bit and making the video to try to convince herself that the partnership was working.

We do not know. The vid is borderline irrelevant, and certainly sheds no light on if / what happened.

Amanda also managed to be a loving onscreen wife to her ex-partner IRL.

She's an actress so who knows how she feels about anyone. I think she's a complex person though. The older I get the more wary I am of complex people. I still think she looked breathless and elated after her 4 dances with Gio.

I’m not convinced the Beeb use Giovanni as some sort of punishment, given that a year before he was paired with Rose Ayling-Ellis.

I would have thought they would give a lot of thought to who to pair with Rose and particularly would not put her with someone known to be aggressive and impatient in their teaching style. The whole situation is really strange.

Right. Disclaimer here. I don’t know Rose A-E or whether she’s profoundly deaf. And I genuinely do t mean this to sound stupid or offensive but if he is a shouty bully then surely he’d soon realise that shouting at a deaf person is
pretty pointless, and find another way?

but that doesn’t mean he’d suddenly change his ways with everyone?

Putting in my two cents here.. I have followed Amanda on social media since Sherlock days and I feel a sense of déjà vu with the current situation. There is always drama surrounding her. At first, I felt sympathy for her and supported her against the fandom’s toxic shippers but soon it became obvious to me she enjoys playing the victim. She was always searching for tweets with Martin or her name and would gush in an OTT manner if the person praised her or would incite her followers to start attacking them if they said anything negative about her. Like a loyal fan, I used to defend her whenever she reposted a negative tweet of her. But after a while, I started thinking, can’t she just ignore them? Like why should tweets from someone with 20-30 followers bother you when you get fawning admiration from hundreds of people? Often times she went back to tweets several days old which no one would have seen and Amanda would say to her followers - look this person said something mean about me. What would then follow was several hundreds of tweets attacking that one person. Amanda would then do a gushing thank you post for protecting her from the ‘bully’. She even opened an account on Tumblr for the sole purpose of finding posts about her and then repost them on to twitter to show to people ‘look I am being bullied’. To be fair some tweets were really nasty but most were about that person’s opinion about the shows or her performance.

I know that she has been subjected to serious bullying from the TRAs but my experience above is before the trans issue. At that time, the most negative thing people used to say about her was about the performances which as an actress she should be able to withstand.

@Over40Overdating I agree with your assessment of her that she just puts on a persona of being a strong, driven woman when in reality she is a very thin skinned woman. I have seen her search her name on twitter and incite pile ones on anyone who may criticise a show that she is in. A recent example from 2022 is her attack on a female journalist who had a mild criticism of the hit west end play The Unfriend. Amanda was called out for her behaviour by professional critics in an opinion piece in a newspaper.

i believe she is a deeply insecure person who needs constant validation and cannot stand any sort of criticism. Why a person like that is in show business is really confusing to me.

Giovanni is a professional, competitive dancer. Strictly is a competition. Any pro dancer will want to win so will want to get the very best out of their partners. Some will excel at the challenge whereas others who appear to be only there for the fee will moan and quit if the going gets tough.

obviously I’ve no insider knowledge but in this world of snowflakes it seems another has fallen from the sky.

I couldn’t agree more.

FFS ridiculous

@Booklover28 you’ve summarised this situation more accurately than anyone else on this thread. 👏

Far too many people are eager to defend celebs with zero critical thinking simply because they liked their programme or identify with their politics. I haven’t shared the details of my experiences as they are outing, would incite a pile on and be picked up by the media but if I were to name change and start a thread on AIBU about a work situation that mirrored what went on, I can say with absolute certainty the responses would be very different.

Booklover28 - very interesting insight - thanks for sharing. Can see how she might need constant validation, praise and sympathy with that behaviour pattern.

And as for the ‘so much for being understanding about MH’ - people with MH issues can be arseholes separately to their MH issues.
People with MH issues can also harm other people’s MH with toxic and inappropriate behaviour.

To imply that people with MH issues must always be victims and never perpetrators is such simplistic and ableist nonsense.