The body's an ornery beast. The brain can understand what's required and send out the correct orders, but it won't necessarily obey. Take Saturday night's Halloween "devil" jive – at times I resembled a badly handled stick puppet – all grins and flailing arms, and completely uncontrollable from the waist down.
My husband always said I'm crap at jiving and I was jolly sorry to prove him right. Still, it could have been worse; I could have fallen down the 16 stairs on which my partner James Jordan entrusted me to jive alone (a pirouette on the eighth no less!).
The BBC's hair, makeup and costume departments pulled out all the ghoulish stops for the Halloween show. There were spangly capes, dramatic masks, menacing contact lenses, and even more fake hair than usual. While the chaps tended to go for the sort of Goth-cum-stockbroker look – unshaven, heavy eyeliner and dark sockets. It was all most effective, I thought, being on the receiving end of a flaming red- orange-and-gold fringe dress, bright red strands of fake hair, devil horns, red glitter eye-shadow, and more black eye-makeup than Katie Price has ever imagined wearing.
The elimination section was appropriately scary, but if I'd lost out I was going to blame Gavin Henson for doing shirtless pull-ups on a piece of lighting rig right beside me when I was just about to dance. It's fair to say he well and truly put me off my stroke (or actually on my stroke, come to think of it).
But my favourite image was actually Ann Widdecombe's dance partner Anton du Beke as a Ghostbuster, in a rhinestone khaki camouflage boiler suit, hand on hip, casually drinking coffee in the production staff break room.
Hope I can stick around – it just gets better and better.
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