STRICTLY COME DANCING 2019 CELEBS: A HANDY GUIDE
Emma Barton. Plays Honey in EastEnders. My mum had to watch EastEnders for a month for a writing course she was doing, and whenever I came in the living room when it was on, she'd point at the screen and shout "I can't STAND this woman! She CAN'T act! She's UNBEARABLE!". Emma Barton was that woman.
Catherine Tyldesley. Played Eva in Coronation Street. Turned up on a lot of Strictly fans' fantasy line-ups, though not for any reason other than "well, she's left Corrie now, so she might as well". Is it true ITV don't let anyone do Strictly if they're part of the current Corrie cast? We'll never get to see Ken Barlow do a samba at this rate. What's the fucking point of even having a television.
Dev Griffin. A Radio 1 DJ. I think radio is something we had before podcasts, and are due to have again after the apocalypse, but it doesn't exist at the moment, so not sure what this is all about. Wikipedia reckons he's known mononymously as "Dev", which ITV will be furious about.
James Cracknell. Rower, Tory*, cunt**. *sorry for the tautology **sorry for the tautology
Mike Bushell. One of those people from BBC Breakfast whose only hope of ever entertaining a single individual is by being picked for Strictly to appear incongruous on a dancefloor. Paired with Katya Jones who copped off with Sean(n) Walsh last year, picked presumably as her most sexless conceivable partner. I think it's the same principle as when they paired Kristina Rihanoff with Daniel O'Donnell, back when she was seen as a vampish maneater, before she went on Celebrity Big Brother to be John Partridge's drippy underling.
Alex Scott. Or, to give her her full Wikipedia title, "Alex Scott (footballer, born 1984)". Surely the first Strictly celebrity ever to have had a column in the Morning Star. Strictly is a show mostly enjoyed by people who are capable of using the word "glitz" without retching themselves inside out, and very few of those people are communists. Partnered with Neil Jones, Katya's estranged husband, pity-promoted from his previous role as an eternal understudy who just pops up in group dances but never gets a partner.
David James. Or, to give him his full Wikipedia title, "David James (footballer, born 1970)". Just realised "him" and "his" are different words but "her" and "her" aren't? Weird. I only know who footballers are if they featured on a UK #1 single, because then I'll have researched and assessed their mortality for my themed Derby Dead Pool team of UK #1 hitmakers, and he wasn't in the England World Cup Squad 1970 (Back Home), the Manchester United FC Squad 1994 (Come on You Reds), or ENGLANDNEWORDER (World in Motion), so I've got nothing here. Happy to discuss Nobby Stiles' advanced dementia and prostate cancer, though. Any moment now, Nobby.
Anneka Rice. Delighted to report that I'm too young to know who she is. I thought I'd seen Treasure Hunt repeats on Challenge, but everything I thought I remembered about them was actually from Interceptor repeats on Challenge. The main thing I know about her is she's not Ulrika Jonsson, and yet on some level I still think she maybe is.
Chris Ramsey. Comedy forum Cook'd and Bomb'd: should I know who this man is? It's the second consecutive series they've got a comedian I've never heard of. I've searched "site:cookdandbombd.co.uk chris ramsey" and it's all threads from 2013 called things like 'Name Some Fucking Shit Comedians We All Hate Here In 2013'. Before my time. I could name plenty of great Strictly picks just from people I've seen at the Fringe this year. Edward Aczel. Mark Silcox. Top Bodybuilder Brian. I haven't finished my reviews in that thread yet but I DO have the time to start a thread about Strictly Come Dancing.
Viscountess Emma Weymouth. Nobody fucking knows.
Will Bayley. World number 1 ranked Paralympic tennis player. Allegedly. Not like anyone's going to check, is it. He has arthrogryposis, which is I don't know what that is. I don't think he has any missing bits, which means he's probably actually fine and should pull himself together.
Karim Zeroual. It always seems a bit bleak when I find myself reluctantly fancying one of the celebrities on Strictly Come Dancing. It's a phase of my life I hoped never to enter. That's it now, machotrouts, that's what you do with your life – get very lightly horny about someone off of Strictly on the telly once a week. He's a CBBC presenter, and obviously I did not know him beforehand, but then I saw the launch show, and ahh, look at him. He's so small and innocuous. I would trust this man around my children. In fact my children could probably defeat this man in battle. I do not have children – but he does not know that.
Saffron Barker. If they're going to have YouTubers, can't they at least find YouTubers who have a Wikipedia page? There are tons of them. Chris Crocker. Rebecca Black. Samwell. Amos Yee. Nyan Cat. Harlem Shake.
Jamie Laing. It felt like an admission of defeat for Strictly to have just some bloke off Made in Chelsea. They don't usually have people who are just some bloke off Made in Chelsea. Even the TOWIE feller they had once I think they tried to convince us was mainly there because he was a DJ. Fortunately his ankle fell off or something in the group dance, and he's already been expelled from the series due to injury. As a replacement, they've drafted in:
Kelvin Fletcher. Imagine not even being in the top 15 celebrities picked for this series. He was on Emmerdale for 20 years, apparently. Imagine giving up 20 years of your life to Emmerdale. You might as well have been born dead.
Michelle Visage. I don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race, but I did get the pleasure of seeing her on Celebrity Big Brother, in which she: tunnelled up the arse of Katie Hopkins, led the bullying of the harmless and gentle Alicia Douvall explictly on the basis that she was "weak", and appointed herself, a straight woman, as the house's chief representative of the gay community, routinely condemning the actual gay men in the house not just for their behaviour in and of itself, but for how it reflected on gays as a whole, specifically accusing Perez Hilton of "setting back the gay community 50 years" for being loud and annoying. Prides herself on speaking up for "misfits", but when confronted with actual misfits, was happy to pal up with an actual fascist to ostracise them further. I hate her, and I hope she breaks several ankles.