Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice

Silent right

Straight to it: the moment of silence during last week’s Strictly Come Dancing was profoundly moving. It came in the same weekend as Remembrance Day and the one-minute silence there, but maybe silence is stronger for being a surprise.

Well, I say a surprise. The Strictly show did go to some lengths to belabour how the dance by Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice would include something for the deaf community. They did it enough that I thought about how odd it was that they were electing to spoil some moment.

But then little is done without a reason.

Ayling-Ellis and Pernice dance and it is remarkable, it’s peculiar how one pair moving to music works and another doesn’t, but this is a particularly strong performance –– and then that dance continued even as the music stopped for a time. Dances on this show are only 90 seconds long so I don’t really have the faintest idea how short this gap was, but it was a strong gap and I actually gasped.

Strictly is a shiny-floor show, and I am as unlikely to be moved by an air-once celebrity programme as I am a football match. So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise and when it’s in a surprising place.

The reason for spoiling how there would be some moment for the deaf community, though, was for the community of people whose first thought is to complain. Like the audiences for Contact who left their cinema seats to go ask the projectionist what the hell they thought they were doing, losing the sound half a minute into the movie.

So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise that you’ve been warned about. No, sod that. Those Contact audience people were just thick and there are always going to be thick people. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether I’m one of them.

Strictly’s silence made me gasp. Contact’s opening sequence made me hold my breath. Both completely unconsciously.

Mind you, I think I may have held my breath a little during the first Mission: Impossible film when your man is hanging from a rope in that noise-detecting room thing.

And actually, now I think of it, it was the few frames of silence at the very start of Trainspotting that grabbed me.

Clearly, I like silence and must use it more in my writing. Starting with

To have and of not

It’s just you and me here so I’m going to confess something and you are not going to tell, okay? I used to have a profoundly deep crush on Darcey Bussell. Then during an episode of Strictly Come Dancing, she told some dancer that they “should of” done something.

I didn’t hear what they should’ve done because I was twitching too much. I don’t remember the dancer or the dance or even when this was. Yet that phrase switched my crush off like a light switch.

And yet this month when the Doctor said it in Doctor Who, well, I still twitched. But I didn’t switch off, I didn’t think much more than a pixel less of actor Jodie Whittaker and a fathom less of writer Chris Chibnall.

Maybe I’ve become inured to it. Maybe I accept that we’re on our inevitable way to having this nonsensical pair of words become a legitimate part of the language.

Or maybe I’m just not letting it switch off Doctor Who for me. It’s possible that I’m maturing, though I see no other evidence of this.

Also, it has been on my mind for six days straight and I needed you to help get it out.

But you have done and I thank you.

Just don’t tell Darcey. You pinky-promised.

Back to the past

On Monday I went back to what was BBC Television Centre, one of those iconic buildings that you know will last forever – and instead was closed down five years ago. I thought I’d never go back because I thought it would never be there: I believed that it was going to be knocked down and replaced by luxury flats.

It’s been partly knocked down and mostly replaced by these flats. But the facade remains and when it’s fully reopened the statue of Ariel will still be in the centre of what was called the doughnut. That was the famous circular centre with production offices, that was the circular centre I spent months walking around before finding I was going the wrong way.

I am really deeply torn.

You can’t conjure up an atmosphere in a building, you can’t make it famous and important. You can throw all that away and I do think the BBC did: they sold it off, rented it back for a while and then let it go.

Only, now they’re renting a bit of it back.

If you stand in the front of the building and look ahead, you see the old circular doughnut done up with new red cladding. Look to your right and you see an entire, huge section of office building has been replaced by an identically-sized stretch of apartments.

But look to your left and you’ve got the old studios 1, 2 and 3.

The old TC1, TC2 and TC3 are still there. And now they’re being used.

I think Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two goes live to air five days a week from TC2 and I think some music show is shortly to launch in TC1.

But I can tell you that on Monday and for the next couple of months, TC3 is home to Pointless. Because that’s what I went to see.

Okay, no, I went to see Television Centre. But I was expecting to be profoundly unhappy at seeing the shell of this building and I needed something I’d like to see or I wouldn’t have gone. Wouldn’t have been able to face it.

And Pointless is fun: I think it’s startling that I saw the recording of something like episodes 1,221 and 1,222 but I had a good time. A head-jolting time as I recognised one of the production team from when I was back at TVC before.

That was disturbing. That reminded me that I know it’s better to be crew than passenger, that it’s better to be making a show than watching one.

But I also left reasonably contented that for the moment, TVC retains its slightly falling-apart feel. True, it used to be because it was slightly falling apart and now it’s because they haven’t finished rebuilding it.

If all of this truly had to happen then I think they’re doing it well. I just miss that place and I miss the me that used to work there so very much.