Strictly is an amazing thing. It pulls the biggest audience in the country into an activity that it will never occur to nearly all of them to try.
And even more bizarrely it attracts 13 million people in America, to a country known perhaps for bootscootin'. But ballroom? What's going on?
Why can you interest somebody in something they will never do? It doesn't even exploit the human back story in the same way other reality shows do. It just sits alone and oozes joy.
Can it just simply be the triumph of human endeavour, mixed with colour, tunes and a little sparkle. What simpler ingredients could there be? Because the entertainment certainly doesn't depend on whether the thumbs are up or the heel turns are actually heel turns, because the camera doesn't catch that. It's not even transmitted. Nobody really cares.
It sells us a big, wet, slug of humanity.
We get told the band is the best there is but we listen to mediocre backing singers chime out-of-tune cover versions of songs we would otherwise love, and still they can't kill the experience.
That you can feel such joy in the joy of near strangers, when you personally have nothing at stake. And feel personal pain or at least a sense of (in)justice on their elimination is an extraordinary thing. It dismisses the German (who else?) invention of schadenfreude. It makes it nonsensical.
Sometimes maybe you just need a reminder of how you can learn to.....feeel...
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