After four long months, there’s only really been a single lesson we can take from the Strictly bullying report
AMANDA Abbington isn’t the only one with PTSD.
After four months and 15 days of relentless Strictly Come Dancing coverage — scandals, cover-ups, briefings and not a single salsa to be seen — I, too, think I may have it.
You, dear reader, probably do, too.
Not to be deliberately flippant on the perils of mental health, but OF COURSE the BBC apologised to Amanda for hurting her feelings.
Because, after 15 years of putting mental health at the forefront of news agendas, this is where we are now.
The BBC was damned if it did and damned if it did not.
But whatever your interpretation of yesterday’s mixed investigation findings, Amanda’s decision to go legal, to stick her head above the parapet, now seems entirely justified.
The corporation formally apologised to her for her experiences on their flagship Saturday-night show after she alleged that her pro partner Giovanni Pernice bullied her and swore at her in training.
While Amanda — who was diagnosed with mild PTSD earlier this year, post-Elstree — released a heartfelt statement saying she felt “vindicated” for speaking out, the Sicilian dancer’s pals were quick out of the blocks to insist he, too, is chuffed-ish with the report.
Their spin is thus: “While it appreciates that the BBC has likely decided to uphold some allegations to avoid accusations of a “whitewash”, they’ve upheld the weakest allegations put to him.”
Charlotte Moore, BBC Big Dog — conscious not to rock the boat — was suitably diplomatic in her response.
She said: “It’s probably worth me just laying out the confidentiality of a complaints process, which I think is absolutely integral to the complaints process, and confidentiality needs to be respected out of fairness to everybody involved.”
In other words, after four months and 15 days no one, really, has a Scooby where we stand.
Fair play to the Beeb for taking this long, though — and taking on two independent investigators to spend hundreds of hours analysing footage and interviewing former contestants, staff members and production — to try to get to the bottom of things.
Lessons have been learned, clearly.
We have all learned that ballroom dancing isn’t for wimps: The lily-livered need not apply, thank you very much.
Patently, too, the BBC needs to practise more due diligence on the celebrity dancers it hires. (And the celebrities it pairs them with.)
Cesspit of horror
Never, in a million years, should edgy, sarcastic, laddy taskmaster Gio have been paired with such a gentle, fragile soul, someone like Amanda. What were producers thinking?
Strictly isn’t for the faint-hearted: Long hours, brutal physicality. Can wannabe Glitterball winners handle seven million eyeballs on them every week, plus the tirade of abuse that is inevitable on social media?
No amount of media training can brace stars for the cesspit of horror X can bring — Amanda, after all, had deplorable death and rape threats levelled against her. No one deserves that.
If the BBC hoped this conclusion would draw a line under matters, it had better think again.
Crucially, this report still leaves the door wide open for other celebs to come forward — on the record — with their concerns, safe in the knowledge their claims will be taken seriously. That they, too, may get an apology.
Amanda’s bravery should be applauded — and thanks to her, and the other celebs who have spoken out about their time on the show, future generations of Glitterball hopefuls will be protected.
Until now, a woman speaking out has been regarded as “problematic” — an adjective that simply wouldn’t be used on a man.
Whatever happened in those training room sessions — and we can all agree it probably really wasn’t very nice — the face of Strictly Come Dancing has changed forever.
Margot as Cathy? Heights of stupidity
MARGOT Robbie, arguably the planet’s most beautiful woman, has been cast as Cathy in Hollywood’s version of Wuthering Heights.
Margot, who most recently played Barbie, is many things.
But a rustic, bucolic, windswept teenager she is not.
Has anyone making this thing ever actually read the book?
Vat's a big Keir harmer
MUCH has been made of freebie-loving Keir Starmer and his rampant hypocrisy over the past couple of weeks.
Understandably, there is much Sun reader anger over his decision to accept Taylor Swift tickets and clobber worth thousands of pounds, while allowing pensioners to freeze this winter (or wrap up in layers of paid-for clothes).
But spare a thought, too, for young parents – those who will be hit hardest by Keir’s VAT rise on independent schools, coming in January.
The idea, pedalled by the PM and his cronies, that it’s about time top hat-wearing toffs fork out for their Latin lessons is insulting.
It’s hard-working, aspirational families he’s hitting, those not claiming on the state or overwhelming the state system.
His forthcoming tax will hit everyone – and a Facebook group called Education Not Taxation: Parents Against School Fee Vat is flooded with furious parents.
Keir, after all, has paid off his mortgage and earns more than the majority of those he’s penalising.
His decision to hole-up in Lord Alli’s plush flat to let his son sit his exams in peace was, apparently, because he “wasn’t going to let my son fail or not do well in his GCSEs because of journalists outside the front door”, as if every Fleet Street reporter was simply itching to get the scoop on the lad’s geography coursework.
But what about the hundreds of thousands of schoolkids who will have to leave their school, won’t be able to take their chosen subjects due to overcrowding and will have to start again, making new friends?
What about their rights to do well?
Boris dog the real Dil
OF all the revelations in Boris Johnson’s autobiography, surely the greatest is that his dog, Dilyn, was struck down with sympathy Covid following his master’s battle with the virus.
The former PM recalls a Chequers walk with the mutt, while he was convalescing.
“It was an effort to get up the stairs, and climbing the hill was impossible.
“So I walked along the flat ground, with our dog Dilyn pulling like a husky, until I noticed to my horror that Dilyn seemed suddenly to have succumbed.
“After a few hundred yards he would lie there all floppy, tongue lolling.
“I had never seen anything like it, and scientist Patrick Vallance later told me his dog had been the same. It felt like a medieval chronicle of a pestilence so bad that even the dogs were struck down.”
Dilyn – a mutt who ate the late Queen’s swan, attempted to hump human legs in the corridors of No10 and once tried it on with Sajid Javid’s cavapoo – needs his own memoir.
IT takes a special kind of stupid to alienate one half of the voting demographic.
But Kemi Badenoch’s casual remark suggesting that maternity pay is “excessive” is a sure-fire way to p**s off young mothers, or women considering baby-making. Or, well, just women everywhere.
The shadow communities secretary quickly cottoned on to the fact such a proclamation might not be a resounding vote-winner, and hastily backtracked.
As a side note, the piece de resistance of her campaign “merch” is a mug declaring: “There’s no Bad in Badenoch.”
LAST Wednesday I went for my quarterly Botox top-up.
Usually, Dr Brendan whacks it in my forehead, a bit around my eyes, and off I trot.
This time, well, time hasn’t been treating me kindly.
“Right, we need to treat your resting bitch face,” he said, breezily – and four units of toxin were duly shoved in around my miserable chops.
Apparently it’s called “smiling Botox” in South Korea, which sounds a bit more palatable.
FINALLY! Security experts are calling for an end to ridiculous, never-ending passwords – ones with special characters, numbers, letters, capital letters and the blood type of your second born.
Research shows that the greater the burden on people to remember their passwords, the more they look for shortcuts – leading to possible security hacks.