{"id":133,"date":"2010-12-05T23:01:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-05T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theblankscreen.co.uk\/selfdistract\/2010\/12\/05\/ann-widdecombe-for-president-or-something\/"},"modified":"2010-12-05T23:01:00","modified_gmt":"2010-12-05T23:01:00","slug":"ann-widdecombe-for-president-or-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2010\/12\/05\/ann-widdecombe-for-president-or-something\/","title":{"rendered":"Ann Widdecombe for President! Or something"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Anything, really. King. Queen. National icon, I don\u2019t care. I sat here saying this, repeating it like a mantra, with my eyes closed and my fingers crossed as we waited to hear whether she was out or not.<\/p>\n

I do think the comments against her were scaldingly personal and I recognise what a sport she was for taking that. I\u2019m also aware that I didn\u2019t like her before the show so it was going to take an enormous amount to win me over. <\/p>\n

Yet I\u2019m now rather pro Pamela Stephenson: I still find the psychiatry schtick a pain, most especially because her Shrink Rap TV series threw away the opportunity to do a new Face to Face level interview and instead was a platform for her to talk. But fast forward ten weeks and I was a wee bit choked during her dance this time. I\u2019m not going to hide that I felt a bit teary when she got that first 10 from Craig, too.<\/p>\n

Thinks. Sudden need to remind you I\u2019m a man.<\/p>\n

I suspect that just did it: the feeble need to remind you was masculine enough. Though I\u2019m also going to say that if you could possibly vote for the professional and not the celebrity, I\u2019d have voted for Katya Virshilas.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

Ann Widdecombe.<\/p>\n

I offer that one reason people like her is that she doesn\u2019t suffer fools – and that a reason I don\u2019t is that she somehow expects fools to suffer her.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ve just called myself a fool.<\/p>\n

Still, I don\u2019t see you disagreeing. Let\u2019s move on.<\/p>\n

You could disagree a little bit, you know.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying you have to mean it.<\/p>\n

Anyway.<\/p>\n

Ann Widdecombe.<\/p>\n

If she\u2019s been the only problem in the series for me this year, there have been odd niggles and they seemed to resurface this week. Claudia Winkleman got an unexpected send-off: you could really only infer that she isn\u2019t doing the rest of the results shows, it wasn\u2019t announced per se. We just had Tess with that Borg-protrosion heavy metal nail gun frock suddenly getting emotional over Claudia for anywhere up to a fifth of a second.<\/p>\n

Then on Saturday night\u2019s show both Tess and Bruce kept emphasising the wrong day: \u201cWe\u2019re back Friday, Saturday and Sunday!\u201d with heavy underlining of the word \u201cand\u201d. It was as if the Sunday show was the new and unexpected one, not the Friday.<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s because the Friday\/Saturday split makes sense to them and it\u2019s news, to their mind, that Bruce is doing the Sunday again. Not quite news enough for them to tell us explicitly, though, it\u2019s as if we are supposed to know these things. That\u2019s what niggles me; it\u2019s like the contortion over the results show, the way we have to pretend the results are called out in two batches when it looks reasonably certain that it\u2019s one go edited.<\/p>\n

We do know that everyone is to do three dances next week: two individual and one group one. We also know that if they did this in one go the show would overlap with The X Factor so perhaps we do understand why it has to begin on Friday.<\/p>\n

There was a moment this weekend when it was asked whether Ann Widdecombe could manage to learn three dances for next week. Obviously now she doesn\u2019t have to, obviously I just wondered why it was asked when she’d yet to learn any dances that I could see.<\/p>\n

But it actually made me wonder about Scott.<\/p>\n

Watching him fall asleep for half a second in training, falling asleep standing up, was a little scary. I\u2019ve done it myself, I recognised the sensation, and I feel for the guy. But in a slip of the tongue, he said that he was jaded, not tired. The man was exhausted and you can\u2019t expect him to be jolly while that wrecked, but still he\u2019s right: there is a jaded feel to him and I think he\u2019s lost it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s for this reason that I thought he\u2019d go this week. I think now that he will go next.<\/p>\n

Not that he should, there\u2019s little question that Gavin is the one who ought to be leaving next. But I\u2019ve been voting for Katya, so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anything, really. King. Queen. National icon, I don\u2019t care. I sat here saying this, repeating it like a mantra, with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4chyI-29","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}