An Homage to David Myers (Strictly Spoiler Alert!)

Ok, so first the spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen the Strictly results show for this week, and you don’t know who went out (and you care) then you probably shouldn’t read any further… For the rest of you, read on!

So last weekend, in week 7 of the competition, Dave Myers was finally voted out of the Strictly Come Dancing competition. I can’t say that I was upset. In fact if he had stayed in for much longer then I was going to start a campaign to get as many people as possible to vote for everyone else in the competition! I am still slightly astonished at how bad he was at dancing after essentially practicing 30+ hours per week for almost 10 weeks!

And I’m not going to miss him because he was ‘entertaining’ either. As Len said, he was the peoples champion. I suspect that the reason for this was more that he was entertaining like a car crash is though. It looks awful, almost to the point of being painful… but you just can’t help rubber-necking at it to see what is going on!

The reason that I will miss him is for his sheer enthusiasm for dancing in spite a lack of any discernable talent! In his clompy, stompy way he showed that you don’t have to be a great dancer to enjoy dancing. This is his greatest gift to us!

I think that the most common objection that I get when I enthuse about salsa to my non-dancerish friends (I do have a few of them left!); is that they can’t try salsa because they are unable to dance, because they have two left feet, or they don’t know their left from their right…

In vain do I point out that we all start out rubbish, that that is why we have salsa classes in the first place, that with practice the only way for them is up…

Something that CAN however persuade people to try dancing is seing people taking such obvious delight in dancing IN SPITE of a complete lack of co-ordination… What that tells people is that even if their worst dance nightmares are realised, and they are unable to ever even learn the basic moves with any degree of competency (very unlikely, but you never know), then at the very least they will have a LOT of fun!

And that is why I pay homage to Dave Myers.

Thank you Dave, you are a shining example to us all!