Joyce McMillan: Song and dance over Silver Spartacus tells a story

Published on Friday 21 November 2008 21:02

WHEN I was a schoolgirl growing up in the 1960s, there was nothing I liked better on a wet Saturday afternoon than to settle down in front of the television to watch an old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie.

It wasn't just the soft-focus black-and-white beauty of the films themselves – although they are very classy pieces of work, with terrific dance sequences, and fabulous songs by composers like George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin – it was also the sense of excitement and magic they held for my parents' generation, who, as teenagers themselves, had watched these films through the depths of the 1930s Depression, and had seen them as a beacon of hope, romance and lighthearted loveliness in a bleak decade.

Fred and Ginger first worked together in 1933, the same year that saw the release of the first great Busby Berkeley spectacular, 42nd Street. And through all the grim years of soup kitchens and hunger marches, dustbowl deprivation and federal work programmes, the glittering image of couples whirling together across shining floors – or of great chorus-lines moving as one through a wonderland of mist and feathers – seemed to play a key role in lifting hearts, offering people a temporary escape from their troubles, and rekindling their faith that life would one day be good and carefree again.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that as economic depression returns to haunt us, the image of couples dancing once again looms large in the public mind, and arouses strange passions. Admittedly, John Sergeant – retired BBC political correspondent extraordinary – is no Fred Astaire, nor was his partnership with lovely Strictly Come Dancing professional Kristina Rihanoff ever likely to achieve Fred-and-Ginger levels of harmony.

For all that, though, Sergeant's presence on what was already a hugely popular television reality show seems to have triggered a profound public response. Just as the show itself reminds us of the fun, the exhilaration, the sheer in-the-moment physical pleasure of dancing together in couples or in groups, so Sergeant's tubby but genial appearance on the floor suggests that this pleasure is not confined to the young and beautiful, but can belong to everyone.

So it's small wonder that when he decided to leave the show, millions of viewers around the country felt strangely bereft and angry, as if they themselves had been cold-shouldered off the dancefloor of life for failing to conform to the slim, superfit image achieved by professional dancers, and also aspired to – with some success – by almost all previous celebrity contestants on Strictly Come Dancing.

There are, of course, some worrying aspects to the John Sergeant affair, not least the rank confusion it betrays over whether reality shows such as Strictly Come Dancing represent substantive tests of character and ability, or just superficial public popularity polls. As previous contestants like Carol Smillie will testify, competing seriously on Strictly Come Dancing is hard work – to look halfway decent on camera performing complex ballroom routines, the celebrities have to put in gruelling hours of practice.

So to see all that blood, sweat and tears being effortlessly sidelined by the sweetly elephantine Sergeant, who reputedly read a newspaper through most of his practice sessions, must have been as galling for the other contestants as for the judges.

And the viewers' active preference for his half-baked performance, over those which actually showed some effort and competence, can be read as another example of the weird and self-destructive dumbing-down of a culture which seems, of late, to have taken an increasing dislike to its own past achievements, and to have come to resent the whole notion of specialised professional skill as somehow elitist, snobbish, and fraudulent.

In the 1930s, cinema audiences were happy to be wowed by world-class dancers, projected like gods and goddesses on huge screens. Today, though, audiences want to see themselves up there on television, or they want to know the reason why.

On balance, I think I'd rather take a positive view of the John Sergeant fuss, and interpret it as signalling the return of an aspect of ourselves that has been suppressed for more than a generation, through all the long years of graceless, zombie-like solo dancing in clubs and on disco floors; years when the breathing, imperfect, sexy reality of couples dancing together was routinely replaced by the voyeuristic spectacle of scantily-clad girls gyrating alone in flickering strobe-light, while men flung themselves into autistic private worlds of movement.

For if that was the dance of the age of individualism, then now it seems as if we are returning – little by little, and step by step – to an idea of dance that once again reaffirms our mutual dependence on one another, and our near-magical capacity for generating new life through partnership and harmony. It has been happening for a decade or more, in a quiet way, in salsa clubs and tango classes up and down the land, and now it is breaking the surface in a wave of national obsession with a silly reality show that somehow touches our hearts and souls.

As for Sergeant's role as what one columnist called a "Silver Spartacus", a standard-bearer for the ageing, the plump, and the less-than-physically-perfect, let's just say that we'll know that something truly radical is happening, in the world of body-image, when a woman contestant as old and as unfit as Sergeant is embraced with the same public affection and approval.

But for the moment – well, there may be troubles ahead, as Fred sang to Ginger in the 1936 Irving Berlin classic Follow the Fleet. But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance, let's face the music and dance.