Dancing on Ice. It's always been the runty sibling of the celeb reality shows, hasn't it? Relegated to Sunday nights in January when anyone with any sense is in the pub breaking every single resolution all at once. They may be missing a show that clearly has the best premise of any show ever broadcast ever, but they don’t care. The fools.
The magic of DOI is that its full celebrities so desperate for attention that they're willing to brain themselves on some frozen water in the vain hope that they might get a feature in Closer magazine about their incredible new figure.
They?re putting themselves in actual, mortal danger. Because they want to be back on TV. Does anything ever get better than that?
Clearly, ITV think it does, because they've only gone and totally mucked around with the entire show just to irk us off. Gone is Holly Willoughby and her spectacular, heaving rack, leaving the Dads of Britain with one less thing to jerk over. That’s because she's been replaced by Christine Bleakley and her incredibly pointy and sackable (and punchable) face.
Even the judging panel isn't safe; it's still led by ?Olympic Champion? Robin Cousins, but Jason Gardner and his hair transplant have been replaced by Louie Spence. Emma Bunton, meanwhile, lost her her place to some bint called Katarina who apparently does actually know some stuff about skating because she won a few things once or something.
Although who cares about the credibility. We just want some good bitchy quotes.
Thankfully they've still managed to dig out 15 fame-hungry cretins who are willing to attach blades to the bottom of their feet and spin round in circles a bit, so some things never change. We?d tell you who they are, but we did that last week and you should?ve been paying attention. What we will tell you though, is that Chesney Hawkes broke his entire self and has been replaced by Chico. Which can only make things more ridiculous.
And last night the first seven ?celebs? tried not to kill themselves on live TV. Even though the entire country was willing everyone to do a little bit of falling over. First up BigFace Sugababe Heidi wore a blazer to practice, which was clearly hugely inappropriate. Then she broke her original partner by destroying his absolutely massive arms. We briefly expected Brendan Cole to appear and save the day, but some Russian guy did instead.
Then she did her routine and didn't fall over and the judges said some things and it wasn?t that exciting.
Next up was Mark from ?Sam and Mark?, that dreadful Pop Idol-spawned kids TV monstrosity. He was paired with Frankie-no-surname. And according to the VT, he was awful. Truly, appalling dreadful. And probably person most likely to fall over, which was why they made him skate to ?I'm Still Standing?.
Annoyingly, he didn't fall over, although he did have the best wobbly leg that TV has ever seen.? It was like he was being electrocuted from the waist down. Whilst pulling a stupid face. And getting low marks.
Out for the Mum votes was Charlene Tilton, who was apparently once in Dallas. hecklerspray?s mum says she was called the ?poison dwarf?. Everyone on Dancing on Ice says she has ?loads of energy?, which possibly translates as ?more annoying than ten Timmy Mallets.? She definitely annoyed us by being a little bit good.
Jorgie Porter may not be able to spell her own name, but according to her VT she's up for anything. And has none of the fear. ?But she did have a slow song, which, through some weird reverse logic is apparently harder than a quick one. She did all sorts of complicated lifts and scored 18.5 which was apparently the best thing any of them had ever seen.
Stuck attempting to follow Jorgie and her flounciness was Chemmy Allcott who is apparently a downhill skier who has broken everything in her body. Including shattering her leg. So obviously going on ice is a really, really great idea and not at all likely to end in a horrific injury.
Thankfully for both Chemmy and the future of British skiing she made it through without damaging anything else. Which is probably for the best. Because if she fell over there's every chance she'd actually break into a million tiny little pieces. And then ITV would have to pay out a lot of compensation to traumatised viewers and would have no budget left to produce such classic telly as Wild at Heart. And nobody wants that.
Following Chemmy, the human Humpty Dumpty, was some bloke called Andy who is apparently a Blue Peter presenter. And was far too chirpy for his own good. He spent a lot of the VT dropping his partner Maria, which got our hopes up that he might do that on actual live TV.
He didn't. In fact, he was quite good. Which means that we have no interest in him at all.
Closing the show was some other Andy who is apparently the comedian of Coronation Street. We were led to believe that he'd be comically dreadful, but instead he was boringly mediocre. ?The selfish twat.
And yet, Mediocre Andy didn't find himself in the skate-off. Nor did useless Mark. That questionable honour was reserved for Heidi and Chirpy Andy, because ITV viewers apparently hate joy. And the Sugababes. The ice panel chose to save Heidi, presumably because they couldn't be bothered with the hassle and confusion of having two Andys in the competition. Who cares about talent and ability? Not Robin Cousins.
Still, the nice people at ITV have given us another full week to recover from the unfulfilled promise of tonight?s show and prepare ourselves for the first skates of the other half of the celebrities. Hopefully one of them will do what they're meant to and stack it spectacularly.
Our money?s on Chico.