“Will you be home in time to see it tonight?” writer Katharine Robb asked me at an event today. I have rarely been so certain in my answer yes, so rarely correct and yet simultaneously so entirely wrong. While you were enjoying Kara Tointon and the best dance of the night, I was at home. Asleep.

It hits you at odd times, the post-travel jetlag zero-exercise no-stamina need for a pillow, but it is the first time Strictly has sent me nodding off.

Bless the wonder that is Sky+, though: I got to watch the whole thing, as live but delayed by an hour or so. And the only consequence was that as I reached for the phone to vote for Kara, Tess Daly said on the telly: “No, William, you’ve messed it up again, voting closed about a minute ago.”

I may be paraphrasing there.

Funny night, don’t you think? Blackpool feels very different: we got many more camera angles from behind a row or two of audience and somehow I had a sense throughout that all the dancers were farther away than usual. I felt the distance, felt less connected at times.

And I can only account for the scoring by assuming the judges have finer eyesight and better seats than I do. Matt Baker’s tens were kind, Pamela and James’s ones were a kind of stock clearance, using up the tens before the show finished for the night. And while I could well accept Len’s logic about Kara’s dance not being as advertised, I was disappointed with Craig only giving her a 9.

But as my mind wandered during Ann Widdencombe’s Canary Waif routine,I kept coming back to Anonymous’s comment last week: the point that I was wrong about celebrity dancers and the Argentine Tango. I’d posited that Kara Tointon’s was the first time a celebrity had done it that well and Anon said no: what about Mark Ramprakash?

It’s a true and a good point. I’d forgotten him – and yet I hadn’t forgotten that dance. He and Karen Hardy dancing the Argentine Tango back in series 4, way back in 2006, that was one of the highlights of the whole of Strictly. I can see it now, vividly clearly remember her dance steps, his lifting her, her stroking a leg against him like a preying mantis.

Yet I forgot him because I realise now that I see the Argentine Tango as the woman’s dance. The man is there to frame, to support, the woman does all the work.

Which means Anonymous sent me off doubting my memory and brings me back ever more sure of what I said: Kara Tointon isn’t a pro but I really think she dances like one.

I’ll say it again: give her the trophy now.

Not that she really stands a chance at beating Ann Widdecombe. Seriously.

Perhaps you had the sound muted because Bruce Forsyth was making the funnies but if you caught him contorting a gag about the Las Vegas of the North, please picture me with a cold slice of pizza and a surprised look: I’m in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas of the, er, Nevada.

Angela and I are here, it’s a work thing, I’d tell you but I promise you’d be bored by the fifteenth paragraph and I’d be irritatingly giddy, so, you know, enough. The fact that Bruce made this gag that way was disconcerting, that’s all. No more about me and half-choked, half-cooked pizza.

Instead, you’ll also have seen Pamela and James opening their routine typing on computers. Do you want to know what they were doing? They’d set their Macs in their home office to record Strictly Come Dancing via EyeTV, a teeny Freeview box about the size of a prayer that plugs TV signals into your computer. This EyeTV lark recorded the show for them, it transcoded it into a smaller file size and copied it up for my to my MobileMe cloud space where I was able to pull it down onto the MacBook I brought with me to work on.

If the BBC would just open up the iPlayer to international viewers, I’d have been able to concentrate on my work instead of figuring all this out.

But then it did also occur to me that this is Vegas: would the glamour of Strictly Come Dancing suddenly appear a bit limp to me? Would I have to hide behind geeking out just for something to say? Might I turn to, I don’t know, which satellite I bounced the cloud signal off just so I didn’t give in and rage at you about Ann Widdecombe?

No, if it had come to that I’d just have told you that The A Team movie is very funny when you watch it on an airplane because all the airplane-blowing-up bits of the plot have been removed. It’s like watching Casualty when Gold used to show it during the daytime: you’d get the oh-oh, there’s trouble, then the oh-yes, it’s that big railing spike they keep cutting to and there’d be ominous music if Casualty had a budget, then there’s the eh-what? as the big accident of the week is deleted.

Speaking of Ann Widdecombe, I am just bored. I’m not a fan of the woman anyway, I can acknowledge that she’s handling all this aplombably but I just want her gone. So Len’s effectively positioning the judges on her side did not win me over.

Nor did Kara Tointon’s dance.

But that’s because I was won over by her last week, I’m on this woman’s side, I expect to enjoy her dances and I truly do believe she should win the whole contest this year. We’ve seen many a good Argentine Tango on the show but this was the first brilliant one danced by a celebrity.

Next week Strictly is in Blackpool, the Vegas of the North, and I am not. Did you spend that boring half hour applying for tickets to each episode of Strictly separately? Every week now I am reminded of that afternoon because the BBC ticket office regularly now emails me to say tough luck but there may be spaces for a hilarious new Radio 3 comedy about ducks.

Still.

I feel a bit bad complaining about never getting to travel to Strictly since I am currently 5,212 miles away.

Right. Sorry about that. I must away to the gaming tables. Someone’s got to fund this trip, you know.

It’s okay.

I have a system.

William

So it turns out that I can talk. Possibly you’re not surprised, especially if you followed a link here expecting Strictly Come Dancing chatter. There is plenty and it contains News: you’ll find it here, which is the metric equivalent of about an inch down the page.

Anyway. Talking. Possibly you think my problem is more on the shutting up side, more likely you’ve never spent a second thinking about it.

But it turns out I can talk and it was a little startling to me.

Specifically, I can pitch.

At speed.

The one thing that spoiled the London Screenwriters’ Festival for me last weekend was the dread and the fear of pitching an idea to people in a speed-pitching session. And then the things that risked overwhelming the whole festival for me were the fire in me when I got to do the pitching and the elation when it went so well.

It’s interesting to me that what I got out of a writing festival was speech but that was always going to be the way. No matter what anyone tells you about courses, nobody can teach you how to write. Get better at it. Get more successful at it. But writing itself, no. I don’t know if this troubles you at all, but in case it does I will also point out that there are many fine people who state without question that if you were to spend 10,000 hours on your writing you would become a fantastic writer.

If you believe that, please come back when you’re on hour 9,999 and we’ll talk.

Even then, see, it’s all about talking. I used to truly wonder if writers are the people who don’t write.

Then I met several hundred who all wrote, all the time, and still had lives so long as you count other jobs and wine o’clock as lives.

I did get into a natter about science that had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with entirely fascinating me. I did meet people who proved to be as funny in the flesh as they do on Twitter.

And every one of them has at least one great script or great project – oftentimes they left it up to you to work out which it was – and every one of them was increasingly fired up by this festival weekend.

I wasn’t going to the London Screenwriters’ Festival until I got a bursary for it from Screen West Midlands: thank you very much to them. It’s first time I’ve been directly funded for an arts event and it was an event I was very keen to go to so that was particularly good news that could not possibly have even a hint of a dark cloud.

It had rain instead.

I learnt that as part of the bursary, I got to take part in the speed pitching sessions. I just had to tell them ahead of time what my project was so the organisers could match me up with people who might be interested. The project I got the bursary on wouldn’t do: it’s tied up with a producer already. So I said the first one that came to mind, the first script of mine I could think of.

I contemplated pitching the idea without rereading the script or even entirely fully remembering a single thing about it.

Somehow that just seemed to make a five-minute speed pitch feel like it was going to last an hour. So I read. And, since it’s you, I’ll tell you I enjoyed the piece. It’d been a year since I looked at it and I’d forgotten so much that I got into the story again.

Let me skip ahead: all three people I pitched to liked the idea.

But let me skip back: I’m a writer on a bursary who has to show what he’s got and do it at lightspeed. I was genuinely scared going in to this session and it coloured the whole first day of the festival for me.


Since you ask, the colour was a kind of Doppler effect: all blue in the morning before it, all brilliant red in the afternoon after. I left that room ten feet tall and wouldn’t have noticed if the rest of the festival was bad or perhaps if it even happened at all.

I’m bubbly about this event just talking to you, feeling anew that rush that came before the chin-on-desk slump when I got back home to work. There were things that didn’t go well at the festival: one speaker advised new writers to write a spec Absolutely Fabulous script. Silly man. “Hello, Mr or Mrs or Ms Producer, here’s a script I’ve written for a show that finished ten years ago. I promise I haven’t spent a decade on it and I do know that comedy has moved on a bit since then. Can I have a commission now, please?”

But I learnt that soaps are brutal and harsh and so very like the newsrooms I was trained in that they appeal to me again. I found out that German television makes a billion and a half single dramas every hour where UK TV hasn’t since the 1960s. I fortunately also found out that German television translates British-language scripts.

And of all the events, I had the best time in a crime one run by Barbara Machin. Finally, someone else who likes crime and doesn’t care whodunit. Or rather, that’s the least important thing in a crime tale that’s any good.

It sounds a bit off, but hearing people you rate saying the same things you believe is rather invigorating. Please agree with me in the comments here and make me feel great.

I have learnt for next year, however. I’ve learnt that I need to practice my trade more, I need to build up writing muscles, I need to exercise what resilient skills I have: oh yes, next year I too must be able to stay up drinking Pepsi until 7am and losing my voice.

If you want to know more about Screen West Midlands who funded me, they have a particularly fine website here. And as for the London Screenwriters’ Festival 2011, you’ll probably hear about it first on creative director Chris Jones’s blog.

I’ve said to you before that there’s no Strictly blog on RadioTimes.com this year and this is true. Would I lie to you? When you could catch me out that easily?

But there is today a piece I’ve written for them about Ann Widdecombe staying in while good dancers go out. For balance, the piece also covers a similar thing that is apparently happening on The X Factor with someone called Wagner but, really, I phoned that bit of the piece in.

RadioTimes.com: Are Novelty Acts Spoiling Strictly and X Factor?

Tell me you didn’t look at the final leaderboard this week and gasp: “Scott’s at the bottom!” even though Ann was below him. Tell me it’s not you voting to keep her in every week. We can get past this, our friendship can survive the blow, but if we have nothing else, we have to have honesty.

It would be nice to have news. I’m a newsy guy. And I have some. If Ann Widdecombe is the bit of Strictly that should go, perhaps in an ideal world taking all the props with her, then in a fair and just world, there is someone we should be thanking for how very much better the show is this year.

It’s not the fabulous Dave Arch who can’t be bothered to take his headphones off. It’s not the fella with a hat who sits behind him. It’s not any headgear person at all because this one isn’t directly in the production, isn’t even credited at the end.

She’s Katie Taylor, head of entertainment and events at BBC Television and she dun it. It helped that the BBC has invested more money and there is a new executive producer too but Taylor is responsible for the revamp.

And she told Broadcast magazine this week that she may not be done with the show just yet. “Nothing can stay the same or the audience will get bored, and when that happens, they switch over,” she said. “The format is the format, but it’s there to be tweaked.”

You see the word tweak and you think Bruce Forsyth but, no, he’s not on the way out just yet despite skipping the results shows this year. “Bruce is 83 and his energy is quite something,” she told Broadcast. “But it was tiring doing both shows, and Claudia, who is already part of the Strictly family, is so witty and really lives and breathes the show, so Bruce was really happy with it. I am sure he will call me up if he decides to leave, but we’ve not had that conversation yet.”

I’m ready to declare a winner, by the way. I’m ready to call it. Kara Tointon for champion. You saw it here first, unless you saw it anywhere else before me and didn’t mention it.

Yes, the tricks as she called them were quite eye-popping but what got me convinced was the return of what I’ve briefly seen before with her: a moment or three when she wasn’t dancing steps, wasn’t following choreography, she was in the music.

I don’t think there’s anything more I could want.

Except for Ann Widdecombe to do a John Sergeant and leave gracefully. For gracefully read quickly, but gracefully is good too.

Perhaps you already do this and I’m certain you’d enjoy it if you did: watch Strictly while using twitter to discuss it blow by blow, frock by frock, lift by stumble.

Now, if you do that during drama, if you do that during In Treatment, then you and I are going to have words. After the show. But in shiny floor entertainment, not only is it a genuine boon, last year it was often all that made Strictly worth watching.

This year, things are much better so tweeting isn’t necessary and in fact if you’ve been affected by the subjects discussed in this blog, please contact the helpline on @wgallagher.

But this week I was off. Away. I’m getting reluctantly used to missing episodes of It Takes Two when necessary, I’m itchy but acceptant about delaying watching the main show if Angela’s away or we’re off together. But this week it was me, gone, away, off. By heart-wringing agreement, Angela was left to watch Strictly without me.

And to text me with Very Unhelpfully Tantalising Not To Say Cruel messages.

Such as this one. I’m in a pub. It’s work, okay? I’m not enjo – well, I am, alright, but It’s Kind of Work, and I get the familiar throb over my heart as the iPhone in my shirt pocket vibrates this text at me: “How did Brendan do that with his waistcoat?”

Followed by “Not a great music choice.”

I tell you, after a few of these it is entirely possible that I was chatting with you in that bar and wouldn’t know.

“Vincent has the cutest son.”

Okay. Okay. This has all been by text, it’s all been direct texts from Angela to me. But I’ve still got twitter. Yes, yes, thanks, mine’s a Coke on the rocks, I’ll be with you in a sec.

“I just realised, Kara’s paso dress is the same as Alesha’s AMAZING FLYING CAPE DRESS! I need to get out more” @PadsterMo

“Well that took the sex right out of the Argentine Tango” @gibbzer

Wait, Angela’s back texting: “How do they do those eyes on Jimi?”

Thanks for the Coke, I need a whisky chaser now.

Flashforward to the results show and my beloved Angela texts me on my train home saying: “Shock – I didn’t expect them to go!”

TEASE

Angela: “Did I tell you we had the first 10s of the series?”

TEASE.

Here’s what I’ve learnt from the weekend. I have yet to see one dance, one vote, one frock and this is all bad.

It’s rather fundamentally bad and it must be stopped, I must watch our Sky+ recording immediately.

But on the good side, it was by far the most tantalising and tense Strictly I’ve ever not watched.

Next week, we continue the science experiment by attempting to watch The X Factor without drinking.

Two reasons the US Dancing with the Stars doesn’t work. They use props to disguise that they’ve not got the dancing chops and the celebrities are overmarked so much that you wonder what happens to our Len and Bruno on their transatlantic flights.

Now on Strictly Come Dancing, we’re getting props aplenty: this week the Play School windows with Matt and Aliona, the “strumpet” wine glasses with Felicity and Vincent, the flying rig for Ann Widdecombe. Plus we’ve had card tricks and even wellies. There was a time when Len used to object if they had so much as a cape.

We’re also getting very high marks: couples this week, a month into the three-month series, came within whiskers of getting 10s.

But not unreasonably so. Unlike previous Strictly and unlike all Dancing with the Stars, the dances have boomed into life immediately and the standard now is what we’re used to seeing much later in the series. I’ve even had a brief glimpse of that intangible moment that makes Strictly so good: the dance that blows you away. While Kara Tointon’s routine was niggle-marked by the judges, she had the music. Wasn’t just doing the steps well, she was dancing the music.

Reminds me of when I knew John Sergeant was going to be trouble. On one of those “we’ve just met for the first time, really” items, his professional dance partner Kristina Rihanoff asked if he could hear the music. “I’m not deaf,” he said. Despite his known Broadway dance experience and the way his frame is as ruggedly athletic as mine, that’s when I knew he’d be out in a week.

Well.

Things you might not want to know: Strictly’s results show is indeed recorded on Saturday nights while we’re all out but naughty people allegedly post the outcome online around 10:30pm. I haven’t looked. Let it be between you and your conscience if you bookmark the DigitalSpy.co.uk forums. I would offer that betting shops have probably figured this trick out by now.

Things you have no reason knowing: I am the only man on Earth who does not, um, respond to stockings and suspenders. I think they look silly. Consequently Erin had the worst costume of the night for me.

But then it was a poor night for frockwatch: it’s always a little bit rubbish when Tess Daly gets the best outfits.

Still, if the dresses were lacking, the dancing wasn’t and that’s probably the best way around, sulk, stomps foot, shrugs like a teenager. And the dances are good: it’s hard to remember how much conversation and nipping out to put the kettle on we used to be able to have during last year’s routines.

You do wonder if the standard can keep up – and whether it’ll be a bit dull if they all get to 10s in week five and have nowhere else to go for the rest of the series. I’m not saying a word about 11, but we’re all thinking it.

We just need to get rid of the deadwood now. And with Peter Shilton gone, we’re making a start.

Let’s not get carried away. But Bruce Forsyth was funny enough that I looked to see whether there was a new writer on the credits. What do you mean, you didn’t know there was a writer?

This time last year I would’ve seized on this because the dancing itself was giving me problems. Writing on Radio Times, I did wonder first whether RT would be all that impressed with my criticising every inch of the show. They were. If that’s the way it is, they said, what else can you do? After a few weeks of that, though, it became that I wondered whether you’d be all that impressed. Another week, another criticism. I was running out of gags.

But it feels a world away now because this new series is flying. We’re seeing real dancing already and moreover it feels like real competition. So soon. And with so many frontrunners: Matt Baker, Kara Tointon, Pamela Stephenson, Scott Maslen. All of them doing well and in fact much better than they should be so soon into the run.

I want to add Felicity Kendal into the list of people doing well but I can’t watch her. No human being should be able to bend like that. You know those bent over double back-spraining moves? I can’t make that move going forwards.

I can look before she dances, though, and she does consistently get the good frocks. So does Flavia. I swear to God that Ola’s costume made her look fatter this week: it cannot be so, it is not physically possible to make her look fat, but it tried.

Again, I’m not a man at all. Men should be newsy, right? Let me have a go. Tina O’Brien got a bye this week because of her chicken pox but if she’s still unwell next week, that’s it. Chicken pox usually lasts 7-10 days (see? You’re getting hard facts here) so it’s surely touch and go whether she’ll be back at all, let alone whether she’ll be back in time to rehearse enough.

You’re wondering what’s going to happen with Brendan Cole too, aren’t you? He’s out next week: he’s flown home to New Zealand following the death of his father. But Michelle Williams will be dancing: she’s reportedly going to be partnered for one week by Ian Waite.

That’ll be confirmed, presumably, in tonight’s Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two. Last year this series was better than the main show; this year the main show is catching up with it. So now it’s only the Sunday night results show that needs fixing.

Silenced is Goldie and my eyes can’t see quite why. I wasn’t a fan, I don’t especially mind he’s out, but he could move a bit and so far Peter Shilton is just the bloke who gets to stand there watching Erin Boag dance closer up than the rest of us.

Do you ever think you’d forget to dance? That you’d just get lost watching your professional partner dance so stunningly? A poet once performed close-up poetry on me, her nose practically touching mine. Mesmerising. Not all that hygienic, but mesmerising. If I were a celebrity partnered with someone as good as these dancers, I would just find myself enjoying their dance and entirely forgetting mine.

Oh, come on, you’ve thought about it too.

Anyway.

Maybe it’s because I’m completely untouched by football that I don’t appreciate Peter Shilton and can only take it on trust that he has in some way done something important for someone, some time. It was vital, I know that. It was more important than anything I’ve ever done, I actually do know that.

I should say that while I wouldn’t miss him and I won’t miss Goldie, it’s nothing personal in either case. The only feeling I had when Goldie’s name was finally announced was a mild case of immense, total and overwhelming relief.

Because I didn’t see Strictly until Monday night and the power of Twitter meant that I knew the outcome where Angela, with more self-control and anyway she’s a Facebook user, did not. I hate knowing the future.

Much easier knowing the past. Such as the way in every previous Strictly series we’ve had a few duff yet entertaining weeks as these folks find their feet. How it takes a good month before we start seeing anything interesting and the reason we watch is promise and anticipation more than any great reward.

But to give this year’s series credit, we’re on the second week and it already feels as if we’re deep into the contest. Maybe there’s still no utter wow of a dance but there is spectacular, there is strong dancing and there is a sense of competition fight in people.

We’re also somehow finding favourites sooner. Last year I hung on to hoping Craig Kelly would get better because I just liked the guy.

This year I’m a little the opposite. I don’t happen to like Ann Widdecombe so I’m not engaged with her routines, much as I can respect how she’s handling it. I don’t happen to like Paul Daniels, but that’s not his fault, that’s just an opportunity for a tea break.

There does seem to be more personal comments and jibes this time around. Daniels got described as Yoda – like it not did he, a lot not he like – which seemed unnecessarily cruel when he’s a bit more like Golum, really.

The jibes surprise me a little, the newfound use of dance props reminds me more of the US Dancing with the Stars than Strictly: if Erin brought out those mannequins now, would it still be Muppetgate?

Yet the biggest surprise was the mess of the results show with Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman. Do you see the logic of how how the saved and the unsaved couples were announced? If there’s anything shiny floor entertainment shows are not, it’s complicated. Yet splitting things up, looking like they’d recorded it all in one go and edited it around, I felt I parked my interest until they’d brought out the two muggins facing the chop.

Claudia Winkelman’s name came up in a couple of meetings I had the other week and in each I was unable to convince people that I don’t rate her because I fancy the woman. Look at how quick-witted she is, I argued fruitlessly. Yeah, but wait to see how good she’ll be on the results show. How much better she’ll be than Bruce Forsyth.

I hate not knowing the future.

True, Saturday’s show wasn’t as good as Friday’s but this is already a better series than last year’s. Enough so that you can relax into it and immediately enjoy those familiar Strictly staples.

Such as the contractually-negotiated introductions. Jimi Mistry is “movie star Jimi Mistry” when he walks down the stairs, much as Jo Wood was an “entrepreneur” last time. Then “Patsy Kensit has done a lot of things in her career,” began Brucie as lawyers fretted about her CV and BBC producers fretted over how Bruce’s jokes would dent the ratings.

Those producers have made more visible changes than any before them and generally they’re very good changes. It is hard not to miss the old spangly purple title sequence but the new one has style and flair and it is impossible to miss the new Enormous Lettering for the celebrities’ names.

We’ve got a new set that keeps the action in one place with Tess’s backstage area now only elevated so it feels inclusive, it feels like it’s part of the action. It does also feel a little cruel to make the dancers have to dart up those stairs before they’ve caught their breath. And – tell me you didn’t think this – the new arrangement and the new camera angels on the dancers bouncing up those stairs are, um, intended to keep a certain half of the viewing audience interested.

Anyway.

We’ve not had a dance that really carries you away yet but the way the new set was lit in fairytale blue for Pamela Stephenson’s dance came close. It is quite an amazing set: that blue for Stephenson, then a sea of twinkly lights for Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow.

It’s not really the Strictly set, though, it’s the Earth Defense Directorate from Buck Rogers. Or at least it was when Michelle Williams and Brendan Cole danced.

Bruce maintained that Michelle Williams was the finest singer with the surname Williams, only as a gag against Robbie but unthinkingly also forgetting both Andy and Dar.

But then Bruce also inadvertently set up the most tellingly ambiguous comment of the weekend. After his spiel about the judges being average, Len told Jimi Mistry that “there was nothing average” about his dance. Breath was held, but he meant it as a good thing.

Which is nice. Even nicer is how we can already disagree with the judges. How they are already seeing different dances than we are. If you watched with someone else, how often did you turn to look at each other and say “Eh?” A clue: it would be exactly the same number of times we saw standing ovations.

Nobody warranted a standing ovation, few were very good, some were terrible. You knew Paul Daniels was in trouble from the start when his wee little magic trick would’ve had three-year-olds shrugging.

He wasn’t bad enough to stop your mind wandering during his dance. And he’s not good enough to get your mind wondering if he’s going to win. Ola Jordan will be available for bar and bat mitzvahs from about week 2. She’ll provide her own costume, but you may not be able to spot it.

It is startling how often the costumes in Strictly cause problems. Kara Tointon must have true precision dancing skills the way the poor woman managed to catch a heel in material as thin as superstring. And that after having her entire personality erased by the makeup and hair styling department.

Erin Boag, Felicity Kendal and Katya Virshilas got the best out of the costume department while Flavia Cacace did best by the hair stylers with gorgeous vivid red streaks in her dark hair.

I’m not a man at all, am I?

I did spot that thing with the camera angles.

A couple of things to tell you. There’s no Strictly blog on RadioTimes.com this year, that’s why I’m waving at you from here, but there is a lot of very good Strictly material on that site. I’ve just cut a series of videos for there showing the celebrities and their professional partners posing for the Radio Times covershoot. You can see that, plus the photos and considerably more at radiotimes.com/strictly.

Whereas I just went to bbc.co.uk/strictly to check the spelling of Katya Virshilas’s name and the spangly new site has remarkably off-putting photographs. Someone at the BBC has discovered Photoshop’s Sketch and Stylise filters. They must be stopped.

Is that harsh? Am I obsessing too much with the new set and Flavia’s hair? As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I’m switching off the thing that means you have to register to shout comments at me here. This does mean we can expect a lot of offers for sex aids and financial windfalls, some written in Chinese. But if we just ignore them, they’ll go play somewhere else.

“It’s never too early to start panicking on this show,” said Len and with that we’re instantly back into Strictly: lapping up the atmosphere, being aghast at the frocks, pitying Anton and automatically tuning out Alesha Dixon.

We’ve just never been away. Yet this does feel like a shaken up Strictly. “This is the best lineup ever,” said Len, this time reading from his contract. Yet there is some truth in it: this is the first series in years where the celebrities are better known than the professional dancers. Then the new graphics are more nicely Hollywood than Shepherds Bush and the redesigned set is smart.

Plus of course, the whole idea of a launch show is new – to Strictly, at least. The format of the launch show is very familiar if you remember sports day at school or you’ve ever spent quality time at a meat market.

There wasn’t the promised tension and excitement over who was paired with whom, not when you could guess most with one squint at their respective heights. But we did have the little frisson over who is genuinely pleased, who is truly appalled and who had comments that were well enough prepared to make you suspect a fix.

There was a fix. Strictly is always cast as carefully as a drama and there is no random shuffle on who got whom but Anton got the joke: forget that Ann Widdecombe has been hired as the new John Sergeant, just look at the sixteen feet height difference. “If you are a politician of course you’re going to say what you think,” said Widdecombe during an interview recorded before we watched her and Anton pretending to be pleased with each other. That was rather sweet, her demonstrating the same grasp of reality she applies to Catholicism.

“That was seriously quite good,” said Bruce as the hour came quite quickly to an end. That was the best part – not that it ended but that it seemed to fly by. It’s easy to criticise the show but it does still have atmosphere, its artifice is balanced by fun and just often enough there are dances that lift you.

Not tonight, unfortunately, but you know they’re coming and you know you’ll be watching. Waddya say, round my place for a Strictly party on Friday 1 October?