England football squads, children of competitive parents, Norwegian entries to
the Eurovision Song Contest — heaven knows there are enough poor souls in
this world who suffer from the pressure of high expectations. It seems
perverse to dump this cruel burden on a patch of the TV schedule. Yet that
is exactly what has happened to Saturday night television.
Even cursory research reveals that people have been mourning the decline of
this beloved national institution for at least ten years. It’s never been
the same since Brucie, Larry, Eric and Ernie, Noel, Barrymore or Cilla, has
it? Each generation has its own golden Saturday night memory as
sentimentally cherished as favourite bands or James Bonds. After a long
delay the BBC’s most expensive transfer from Channel 4, Graham Norton, is
about to try for a place in the Saturday night pantheon as the presenter of Strictly
Dance Fever (BBC One, tonight). The show forms one half of a ratings
pincer movement with tonight’s revival of Doctor Who (following
at 7pm).
Ratings really have slumped since the days when The Generation Game
pulled in 21 million viewers. Three years ago Saturday night viewing figures
actually dipped below those for every other night, provoking a bout of
vigorous breast-searching, soul-beating etc. What was going wrong? Was it
the lack of charismatic stars? Or magic formulas for shows?
At the time, more astute voices, such as that of Peter Bazalgette, the evil
genius behind the first makeover shows and Big Brother, pointed out
that it simply meant that our lifestyles had changed. We had multichannel;
there were videos, DVDs, PCs and computer games. A lot of people have more
money. We get out more.
Even so, the tergiversations of BBC One and ITV1 have been painful to watch as
they struggle to crack this Enigma Code of public taste. Star performers
from other theatres of operation are recruited to assault the problem. Some,
such as the former children’s presenters Ant and Dec, escape with their
careers intact, others die grisly deaths — witness the fate of those
breakfast TV veterans Johnny Vaughan and Denise Van Outen, whose Passport
to Paradise (BBC One) barely managed three million viewers. There have
been successes, such as ITV’s Pop Idol. But the hope that half
the country will settle down in family groups with a beer for the lads and a
sherry for gran, to watch Mrs Mumpkins from Dudley and her son Jason getting
“the big elbow” from some new Brucie, now looks like a Quixotic illusion.
Last year’s surprise success was Forsyth himself, returning in Strictly
Come Dancing to show the young smart-alecs how it’s done. Even then, the
first series peaked at only nine million viewers.
Graham Norton’s response to this pressure is, sensibly enough, to play it
down. When I meet him he is as chirpy as he is on screen. He converses just
as he performs. That playfully camp Irish twang is laced with amusing
changes of pace and carefully timed micro-pauses. There’s lots of chuckling,
which occasionally breaks into that strange half-chortle-half-hiccup that
makes him sound a bit like Goofy.
“All that stuff about Saturday night and ‘What’s Graham going to do at the
BBC?’ — it’s journalists talking to other journalists talking to television
executives talking to other journalists,” he protests. “People at
home COULD NOT CARE LESS! They don’t care who hosts it. They just want to be
entertained.” In which case, one might wonder why the BBC paid him a reputed
£3.5 million to join them.
It was the format of Strictly Dance Fever that appealed to him. “It was
my first meeting with the BBC when they pitched ideas. This was one of them,
and I thought: ‘Ooh! I’d watch that! Because with those weird, ‘big format’
shows, when people in TV talk about making them, it’s as if they’re making
them for ‘somebody else’. I thought: ‘Well I watch telly on Saturday night,
and here’s a show I know I’d watch.’”
The show is a national talent contest for amateur dancers, without what Norton
calls the “celebrity jeopardy” of Strictly Come Dancing.
Would-be contestants did their party pieces at six two-day auditions around
the UK, with a team of choreographers and teachers. I mention the sadistic
pleasure of the Pop Idol eliminators and ask if they have had many
dancers from the David Brent school. “We have had a few,” he concedes, “but
we’re not getting the same level of annoying wannabes as shows such as Pop
Idol. To do this your ambition has to be purer. If you’re a championship
dancer you’re not going to get a stretch limo.” (That said, there are a few
comically heroic failures who may appear in back-story packages in the
shows, and the auditions will be shown on BBC Three.)
Unlike Strictly Come Dancing, the show will boast a cross-generational
mix of dance styles designed to lure and hold family audiences. Teenagers
and their parents can giggle at the efforts of mature breakdancers and
juvenile foxtrotters. Dancers will be paired into couples and progress
through a series of eliminator shows with studio juries and public votes. “I
can’t tell you what the show’s going to be like — we haven’t made it yet.
But if the programmes are a tenth as good as those days out it will be
FAN-TAS-TIC.”
Above all, Norton is impressed by the dancers’ stamina and dedication. “In
London there was a 57-year-old woman who got through to day two. You’ll see
it is tough. You have 18-year-old kids with their legs cramping so badly
they’re like that (he makes wobbly leg movements). They can’t stand — sweat
pouring off them. This woman — not a hair out of place! If nothing else she
should get some sort of promotional thing from the hairspray people.
“In Manchester there was a woman who’d just had new breasts put in, so she was
dancing quite carefully. But the guy she was dancing with didn’t realise, so
he was perhaps treating her a little more roughly than he should.” Was she
not affected by the pain? “No! She’s a dancer. They can dance through
anything. One woman was dancing away — slightly funny look on her face —
vomited into her hand. What should I do now? Ate it! Then wiped her hands on
her top and kept dancing. Troupers! Dancers are troupers.”
What were the most outrageous performances? “We have had some terrible
hair,” he muses. “Dancers are very keen on wigs. A woman in Manchester did
lose her wig — her husband was really cross and didn’t hide it well. Then we
had a selection of — you could only call them poodle things.”
It wasn’t just the hair though, as people went to some ridiculous lengths to
impress. “In Belfast we had funny Irish dancing. People thought: ‘I’ll show
a little versatility here.’ Two people did this — they wore inappropriately
short skirts for Irish dancing — clippy-cloppy. Then they just stopped the
clippy-cloppy and did this bump and grind in the middle of it — then back
into clippy-clopy. It wasn’t a happy mix!”
The learning process is “brutal”, says Norton. Ballroom dancing champions who
excel on the first day fall apart when confronted with salsa or pop
routines, whereas some young club-dancers have picked up many styles with
ease. The beauty of the end product is “stunning”, he says. Seeing large
groups dancing in unison is “almost tribal — I wasn’t going to say that
again. I might end up in Pseuds’ Corner.”
Norton shrugs off the worry that audiences will miss the “out there” rudeness
of his national Channel 4 chat-shows. “I think when people see it, they will
just forget about the Channel 4 show, because it’s so itself.
It’s a show about dancing. I’m not sitting beside a desk with drawers with
you waiting for me to pull out a dildo.” He will still be interacting, like
a friendly tease with his studio audience, except that this time they will
be the dancers themselves.
His friendliness, he insists, is no act. “People imagine they know me, and
they do!” he says. Even so he belongs to a venerable British
tradition of camp humour which somehow makes sex a safe subject. “I’m
harmless,” he says, “because I’m out of the game.” Unlike earlier gay
comics, he is thoroughly out, a process described with honesty and wit in
his autobiography, So Me, but the joke remains the same. A bigger
risk is that he has never done a regular live show before, that exacting
test of fluency, charm and thinking on your feet.
Brought up in Ireland where many of his TV heroes were American, he is not so
burdened by the ghosts of British Saturday nights past, but reveals that he
was a great fan of the much-derided Noel’s House Party. “In its
heyday it was fantastic. In the end it was a bit rubbish, but at its
peak — I really don’t think there’s been anything as good since. I imagine
Noel Edmonds, cushioned by a lot of money, is quite bitter.” Norton insists
that it is the format that makes or breaks these shows, not the presenter,
but there is no doubt that he will be on trial. If the audience get involved
with the dancers his easy charm should see him through effortlessly. And if
the ten million-plus missing viewers don’t stream back?
Well, they’ve probably got better things to do on Saturday night than watch
TV. And it is no fairer to expect Graham Norton to pull them back than young
Toby to get 15 A star GCSEs or Tim Henman to win the Eurovision Song
Contest.
- Strictly Dance Fever, Saturday, BBC One, 5.55pm, further coverage on BBC
Three from 7pm; and Tue and Fri, 7.30pm
