Head Judges. Every reality show has one, even the ones where they can't quite work out who the head judge is (yes, we're looking at you, X Factor). And on Dancing on Ice, that privilege lies with Robin Cousins. Unfortunately for everyone else though, it seems the producers forgot to explain the show to him.
Robin Cousins, you see, has pretty much entirely missed the point of the show that he presides over. Which is a competition to find the celebrity that is best at skating round in circles and doing a bit of twirling. According to Mr Cousins, though, the celebrities only have to compete with themselves. Get that?
They?re not competing with each other, just themselves. Which makes for a pretty shit show unless ITV have been cloning celebrities in some kind of spectacular reality-meets-unnatural science experiment.
Oh, it seems that they haven't. The idiots. So we just had the normal celebrities going round in circles.
Really taking the ?competing with yourself? words to heart was some bloke called Sebastian, who apparently leaps about a bit and was once in Casino Royale. He was so busy competing with himself that he forgot about his partner, and just went around on his own being all spins and leaps and speed and spangles. If this were a competition he’d be a contender. But it’s not a competition.
Also focussed on herself was Jennifer Ellison, who apparently has self-esteem issues. She should come to the hecklerspray?bedsit. We?ll show her some low self-esteem. Young Jennifer though decided to get her confidence back by skating about in a leotard and doing the splits a lot, thus ensuring that a lot of teenage boys will be focussing on her as well. Well… aiming.
Just when it looked like everyone in the entire show was a self-centred knobjockey, along came Rosemary Conley. Who has been learning to skate for two years and yet is still the slowest thing on earth. That's OK though, because she's also lovely and grandmotherly and takes tea to practice. She's so very nice that her partner even felt compelled to save her from falling over when she nearly stacked it at the start of her routine. Because he loves her more than the audience. Not because it's a competition. Definitely not.
The competition was so non-existent that not even Sam of the appalling freakshow that is Sam and Mark could be arsed. The producers tried to make out that there was a rivalry between the kids TV cretins, but neither of them seemed to really care. Which reduces the chances that one will a little bit maim the other with those sharp skate blades. Which is a real shame, especially as Sam was the one most likely to be maimed since he's much, much better than Mark.
Considerably more likely to snap and maim someone is former childstar Corey Feldman. He doesn’t care what people think of him. He just doesn’t want to hurt himself. Unfortunately for Corey though, he's pretty much entirely useless and spent his entire routine looking quite a lot like he was going to fall over. It's ok though, because his partner has clearly found a time machine which has brought her straight here from the 80s, so she can take him back in time and give him a few more rehearsals. About five more years should do it.
That time machine could also come in handy for Laila Morse, who managed to hurt herself back before the show had even started properly. She had the audacity to injure her shoulder off-camera, which was just selfish and boring of her as we didn't even get to laugh at her pain. Still, who cares about her shoulder; apparently she's Gary Oldman?s sister. Gary Fucking Oldman. How the hell did we miss that?
Last-minute replacement Chico, meanwhile does not have stability or balance. We weren't sure if they were talking about his skating or his life in general, but either way it wasn?t going to be a problem, because Chico had the power of Chesney Hawkes behind him. Which is clearly very, very strong, because Chico matched Jorgie?s crazy high score from last week.
It looked briefly like Chico was going to end the night on top of the leaderboard, but unfortunately for him some bloke called Matthew from Emmerdale did remember it was a competition. And Matthew wants to win that competition and beat everyone else into a pulp.?So he set ridiculously high standards, swore at himself a bit and put on some pleather. Because apparently that’s how you win a competition that isn’t a competition. By dressing like a ridiculous gimp. He got a huge score though, so clearly the judges liked it.
At skate-off time it turned out that Corey?s time machine clearly wasn?t working all that well. He joined Laila-secret-brother in the bottom two, where the judges all booted Laila off ?for the sake of her health?. Not because she was old and rubbish, but because she was competing with herself, and herself ? in the form of her shoulder- had won.
So there you have it: Laila misses out on next week?s Movie Week extravaganza, where we expect the time machine and cloning that were hiding out the back of this week?s show to really be put to better use. Or, y?know, some celebs might skate round in circles a bit. It'll probably be the circles.
We look forward to that.