This once great
nation of ours seems to lurch from crisis to crisis on a daily
basis. Every day you can see Robert Peston on the lunch time news doing his Private
Fraser impression whilst telling us about more cash being lost down
the back of some bank’s sofa.
“You’re all
doomed, doomed I tell ye, DOOMED!”
This is, however
the least of our worries. Something akin to civil war appears to
have gripped the nation of late. We are, of course, talking about
Strictly Come Dancing and John Sergeant.
The dashing white
Sergeant
John has been
variously described as a “grumpy troll”, a
“walrus in sequins”, and by the Independent as
“He was to be the Bottom to their Theseus, Demeter and Lysander (Austin Healey, Mark
Foster & Andrew Castle)”, which says more about the
Independent and it’s readers than it does about John
Sergeant!
Bill & Ben were
late arrivals to the controversy, joining the throng after seeing
John’s masterful interpretation of the paso doble.
John’s continued presence on the program after all these
weeks was either seen as a masterpiece of entertainment, a snub to
the egos of B list celebrities and the establishment, or as a
travesty of justice. All manner of explanations for this situation
have been advanced. Some people think that John was responsible for
the demise of at least nine worthy dancers, ignoring the fact that
eight of them would have gone anyway and the ninth probably the
following week. Other grumpies, notably
the judges, were blaming the public for being bloody minded,
ignoring the fact that if the British public weren’t
historically bloody minded there wouldn’t be a British
public. However, as we hope to show, the real villain was not the
panel of judges, the British public, or even John Sergeant. The
problem is trial by elimination.
Bill & Ben have
been contemplating the John Sergeant phenomenon for some time and
decided to do a thought experiment, similar to the one we did in
our cache “You the Jury”. So, consider a Strictly Come
Dancing where
-
The
public do not vote and the judges solely determine the dancers
fate
-
The judges make perfect decisions based on the performances,
reflecting the true ability of the dancers
-
Outside of the main competition the dancers eliminated continue to
dance to the end, doing all the genres of dance, and being marked
by the judges
With these
assumptions we have generated a random set of scores over 10 weeks
with 10 celebrities, as shown below.
The red squares
represent the scores the eliminated dancers would have had if they
had not been knocked out.
So, now is your
turn to vote with your feet and GPSr.
If you think the overall best dancer that OUGHT to have won is
-
Lisa add 050 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Paul add 150 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Wendy add 250 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Martin add 350 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Pat add 450 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Andy add 550 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Jeff add 650 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Tricia add 750 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Robin add 850 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
-
Siobhan add 950 to the Northing & Westing of the headline coordinates
The cache is now
open.
Obviously there is
going to be a lot of bitterness left after the end of the present
series. This may be the time for the nation to “bind
it’s wounds”. Maybe we
should all remember the words of one of the other powerful women in
John Sergeant’s life.
“As St Francis of
Assisi once said, where there is a tree let there be a cache, where
there is a cache let there be a log book, and where there is a
logbook let there be a pencil”