Once it was all about spray-on smiles and sequins but now the body language on Strictly has taken a much more bizarre turn. With Neil Jones looking like the happiest man alive every week since the Kiss-gate scandal between his wife Katya and her dance partner, we now have Amy Dowden looking like the luckiest girl in the world to be partnering Danny John-Jules despite claims of spats that ended with her in tears.
Danny had a bad week on the dance floor last week having apparently miss-stepped at the start of his routine but this week should have been the ideal shoe-in for him with the Samba.
His confidence levels peaked during his arrival on the stairs where he performed a brief shimmy with Amy before blowing kisses at the audience which also contained his mum.
During rehearsals we saw him sitting like a man who is keeping his thoughts to himself though, facing front to camera with his arms folded in a way that suggested status confidence and an enigmatic, closed-lip smile on his face. There was no apparent synchronicity between him and Amy at this point.
She gazed at his face in excitement, bounced and yelled ‘Samba!’ and clapped at him like a parent eager to enthuse a small child and she was also the one to instigate the double-high five of celebration.
To be fair to Amy her body language throughout the evening was all about impeccable smiling, encouragement and support. She threw her arms around Danny in a huge hug when they ended their routine and she continually smiled at him and place one hand around him to give reassuring neck/shoulder squeezes as he heard the judges’ comments.
It appeared from what sounded like rather cryptic feedback from the judges though that Danny might have got over-confident out there on the floor. He hit the room like a firework during the Samba, taking the lead to the point where it looked as though he was the pro dancer, twirling Amy around or even ‘pushing’ her in terms of speed. Bruno even pulled Shirley Ballas’s arm around to show how he might need to ‘chill’.
Despite Amy’s looks of encouragement, Danny didn’t return the eye contact as he picked up the feedback. Instead he performed a mouth ritual that suggested an intense dislike of what he was hearing, running his tongue from the inside of one cheek down under the lower lip and up to stick it into the other cheek.
Perhaps the camera just caught them at the wrong moment but it was the faces and responses of the other pro dancers on the balcony that made for the oddest moment of the night. They’re normally caught in all sorts of poses of wild encouragement for the rival couples but during the two glimpses we got after Danny’s routine we saw some very weak clapping (one dancer only starter to clap when he saw he was on camera) and sickly-looking smiles that did make it look as though some support might genuinely have been lacking up there.
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