For nine long weeks John Sergeant huffed and puffed his way around the Strictly Come Dancing stage, delighting the public and tormenting the judges.

The viewers loved that his toes thudded rather than twinkled, but for the experts, it was too much. “It’s not Strictly Come Entertainment or Strictly Come John Sergeant,” moaned Craig Revel Horwood, one of the panel. “We are supposed to be voting for the best dancer.”

Not any more. Yesterday, at the launch of BBC1’s autumn schedule, Jay Hunt, the channel controller, announced that when Strictly returns in September, it will be a bit of fun rather than a competition.

“Strictly is not the Olympics for ballroom dancing,” she said. “It’s an entertainment show.” BBC sources said the corporation had taken account of the public outcry over the treatment of Sergeant, the former ITN political editor, who was routinely pilloried by the judges.

The decision will pit Strictly’s producers against the judges, who have been universally in favour of projecting the show as a serious dance competition. Bruno Tonioli, the Italian judge, said that he was “appalled and disgusted” that the public kept on voting Sergeant through the rounds of the competition. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “It’s a dancing competition.”

Len Goodman, the head judge, said that Sergeant had made “a nonsense of the show” by staying in ahead of a more “deserving” dancer.

But the biggest critic of Sergeant has become the only casualty of the rebranding of the show. Ms Hunt announced that Arlene Phillips, the judge credited widely as a chief architect of Sergeant’s decision to quit, has been sacked.

Among her many criticisms of Sergeant, Phillips said: “His posture’s wrong, his feet are turned in, he hasn’t got the rise and fall, his head’s on one side. We’ve never had anyone this bad who has gone this far. It is a little bit disheartening when the public are voting for a non-dancing Mickey Rooney.”

Yesterday it was the fans of Sergeant who had the last laugh as Ms Hunt announced that Phillips, 66, was being replaced on the panel by Alesha Dixon, a former winner of the show.

Axing the veteran choreographer in favour of the 30-year-old pop singer prompted allegations of ageism, which Ms Hunt denied. “Hand on heart it is genuinely not,” she said.

She also confirmed that Bruce Forsyth, Strictly’s octogenarian host, would be returning to the show, albeit after agreeing to take an unspecified pay cut as part of the corporation’s drive to slim presenters’ fees.

Phillips was preparing for the funeral today of her agent and would not comment. A source close to her said: “They’re replacing Arlene with somebody who is very pretty and very nice but she has absolutely no experience. It will fail miserably.”

The English Amateur Dance Sport Association also added its voice to the criticism of the decision to rebrand the show, but for different reasons. Mary Corfield, of the association, said: “They’re not looking for ballroom dancing expertise, they are looking for entertainment. They’re going in the wrong direction, frankly.”

She added: “I’ll quite happily see the back of Arlene Phillips, but I would like to see another proper ballroom judge in there. We’ve got 100 ballroom judges in England who could do a better job than those choreographers on the judging panel.” Phillips will become the “Strictly correspondent” for The One Show, the BBC’s tea-time magazine. She is expected to give a number of interviews next week expressing her disappointment at being sacked.

Darcey Bussell, the ballerina, will join the judges for the latter stages of its 14-week run. The phone voting procedures are also being overhauled after an incident last year that saw a public vote cancelled after a quirk of mathematics left viewers unable to save Tom Chambers, the eventual winner, from a dance-off.

Sergeant was unavailable yesterday. He was filming a new show on location.

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