So sad about Strictly.

[CurlewKate]

It's been part of our family life since it started. I really wanted to think it was as wholesome and joyous and life affirming as it looked, even though I knew it probably wasn't.

And there are celebrities that I feel differently about now because they didn't blow the whistle.😢

There are currently large investigations into abuse in sports. It happened in the US and now Canada, I also believe there was a recent report on abuse in the Netherlands.

It's not 'deemed' abuse, it is abuse including sexual abuse. You seem to be trying to make the point that there can't be competition without bullying and abusing other people.

If it includes physical and verbal violence/aggression it is abuse and should be challenged. Doubly so when it’s for an entertainment programme.

Or…try to stay with me on this…try to enforce e professional standards of behaviour. Do you honestly think it’s not possible to teach anything without resorting to abuse?

I am very pleased Amanda Abbington has been vindicated. She has faced so much online abuse by dickheads.

@FailBetter

Georgina Bouzova (James's first partner and last minute replacement for Gaby Logan) - rows with James (the audience allegedly booed at the footage)

I've not thought of Georgina Bouzova for years (actress who used to be in Casualty for those who don't know). After you posted this, I googled her to see what she was up to and her Wikipedia page links to this article in the Times (paywall) which has some interesting quotes in it

https://www.thetimes.com/article/how-to-survive-strictly-come-dancing-

"I’m not a natural dancer, and I’d never really watched Strictly Come Dancing, but when my agent called to ask if I wanted to be a contestant I was up to my elbows in fake blood playing Ellen Zitek, the dodgy foreign nurse on BBC One’s Casualty, and the thought of getting out of scrubs and into sequins seemed very attractive. Plus the money wasn’t bad. It was the average person’s annual salary. I knew the others had already been training for a few weeks, as I was a last-minute replacement for Gabby Logan, but how hard could it be? It was only dancing. I said yes.
Over the next four weeks I was sucked into the vortex that is Strictly Come Dancing. A parallel universe of sequins and acrylic nails. Of permatans and blister plasters. Of fake smiles and ruthless ambition. Nothing mattered except Strictly. And I wasn’t the only one. Here are my ten rules of survival for this year’s contestants.
...
Stop eating now. Those dancers survive on 500 calories a day and so must you. Do not believe any female on the show who says she doesn’t want to lose weight. I saw some of the most intelligent, successful women reduced to calorie-counting obsessives. One woman who shall remain nameless survived on a diet of blueberries for most of the show
...
2. May the best man win However nice and charming the other contestants may be, they are the Enemy. Be pleasant at all times, especially on the live show. You may want to hold their hands and even hug them. When they do their dance you must cheer them on as if it were your own child on sports day. But do not consider them your friends, and remember, when they tell you to “break a leg” they may well mean it. One of the female contestants in my series was all smiles for two weeks, until it came to the obligatory group dance, when I accidentally blocked her face while trying to hold my balance in the tableau at the end. I got a very firm elbow in my ribs, cunningly executed so that my stumble appeared self-induced.

3. Try not to cry

4. Do not commit murder on the dance floor Try to get along with your partner. This is not always easy, especially when they are shouting “It’s not rocket science!” in your face like a sergeant-major. But maintain a professional distance. Otherwise, before you know it, you will be accused of sleeping with them whether it is true or not. And more often than not it is.
Luckily there was no attraction between my partner and me, although I’m sure his wife, Ola, a Polish ice queen who partnered DJ Spoony, thought differently. She need not have worried. I tried to appease her with a gift of flip-flops but was told they were the wrong size. Can’t blame a girl for trying.

....
All the hundreds of hours of your practice will be filmed and edited into a 30-second snippet that will be shown just before you do your live dance. Do not fall prey to the goading of the show’s producers to criticise your partner or the other contestants. Do not repeat what they ask, beg, or order you to say to the camera. You will sound like a cross between a hostage victim and a Muppet. You have a voice, use it. They will cut it anyway if they don’t think it fits in with the story they have for you. Mine went something like: “I am a bit of a porker and my partner is putting me through hell, but I know that it will all be worth it when I get through that foxtrot.”

When it first started and there were fewer contestants and pros, it was very much a light entertainment programme with celebrities being taught a range of straightforward ballroom and Latin dances by professional dancers. As is the way of these sort of programmes, time and increasing demands have morphed it into something quite different. The routines performed between Leyton and Nikita last year, for example, would have been unheard of at the start. As time has gone on, the pressure on celebrities to perform and presumably on pros to get them to perform, has increased exponentially.

It seems to have been forgotten that it should be a light entertainment show, in a similar way that The Apprentice, originally an entertainment show, has turned into a dog eat dog competition.

The premise that you can teach people with no prior experience, to learn a new skill is an excellent one, but it’s very far removed from that now and will implode unless the BBC get a handle on it and put measures in place to prevent the kind of abuse we’ve been hearing about.

It should be possible to teach without aggression and violence. Johannes Radebe, Amy Dowden, Aljaz etc, seem to be able to manage it. There is no excuse for behaving as Graziano and Giovanni have done. I was never a fan of Gio, but I did like Graz and he has no future in dance now and certainly not in this country.

I think any competitive dance environment has the potential to be abusive. I have a DD that Irish dances in a non-competitive school, her teacher is an ex-world champion and the stories he has about his teachers and the teaching methods are horrific, so much so he has chosen to teach non-competitively and with positive psychology. I hear from friends that have children at his old teachers school and the pressure the kids are under to lose weight, dance when sick and turn up to every feis BUT she gets results and makes world champions - so this is where these professionals are coming from, it’s not rainbows and sparkles, it’s abuse and sheer will to win.

I can only imagine the pressure that the ‘stars’ are under to produce results and the ‘spectacle’ each week of achievement from a non dancer. I’m amazed it hasn’t come out before, or maybe it’s just that society has moved on in the last 20 years since it first started.

I also went down this rabbit hole and James Jordan was vile to her. There was a 'jokey' segment with Claudia with clips of him saying she needed to lose weight, banning snacks and saying he was pushing her until she broke.

They knew what Brendan could be like, and they kept him for years - see him here with Fiona Phillips:

GBBO - But there was the incident where someones dessert was removed from the freezer and left on the worktop. Actually saw the episode recently on a re-run. Poor bloke was so upset he threw it in the bin. Obviously he had nothing to be marked on and was eliminated.

Personal opinion is it happens everywhere in all these kinds of shows

How is that an example of bullying and abuse?

I'm a therapist and have had adult clients from a nearby dance school. The abuse and stories they've told is off the charts.

I thought this was so well written that I had a look at Georgina Bouzova’s wiki page. She’s one smart cookie.

I defy anyone to read what you quoted from her and carry on believing that Strictly is some sort of happy and genuine show.

It’s a massive crowd-puller and money spinner for the BBC, with the best exposure possible for some of the country’s most desperate, self-loving and conceited ‘celebrities’. I bet the behaviour of the pros is better than many of the slebs.

I think it's important to remember that some (most) or the professionals are lovely - Johannes obviously, Aljaz, Amy, Nikita, Kevin who's left now, Oti who's also left, lots more whose names I can't remember.

Graziano shouldn't blame the BBC for not putting him on an anger management course - he could have put himself on one!!

PP are putting GBBO as an example of a show where nothing goes wrong everything is dealt with professionally.

I felt it at the time it wasn't dealt with professionally and on re-watching felt the same. The contestant shouldn't have been eliminated that week. His dessert was destroyed through no fault of his own. Nobody should have been eliminated that week.

Hilarious . I miss that baldy from the cookery programmes who had to have therapy to get through his one episode.

Crazy