During the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, I got into Strictly Come Dancing. In this show, fifteen or so celebrities pair up with professional dancers. Every pair dances once or (in the latter rounds) twice each week before a panel of four judges. Those judges score each pair; members of the public also vote by telephone for their favourite performers; whoever gets the lowest combined result ends up in the ‘dance off’: one final performance, after which the judges decide which couple will be saved and which sent home.

I record this process of limited democracy because I want to zoom in on how the judges come to a decision. In season 19, there were four regular judges: Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse, Anton Du Beke, and Shirley Ballas. A fifth judge, Cynthia Erivo, stepped in to cover anyone sick with Covid-19.

We might arrange these judges on a spectrum. Towards one end there were those judges who seemed most focussed on technical skill. Craig Revel Horwood takes up this role the most (as well as – not coincidentally – the role of the villain). Towards the other end there were those judges who examined what we might call the ‘sentimental’ quality of the dance. Rather than saying if a foot was out of place, they might instead praise the competitor for their expression and emotion, or the professional partner for the choice of song. Motsi Mabuse was the most sentimental judge (and – again not coincidentally – perhaps the judge that divided opinion the most).

Shirley Ballas and Anton Du Beke fall nearer the middle: Ballas is slightly more technical, while Du Beke is more sentimental. But the presence of this spectrum can sometimes result in the feeling that the show is operating two different markschemes: a sentimental one and a technical one. You can almost fail at one but triumph in the other, and still do OK. However, the very best performers excel at both.

This was the case with the show’s eventual winner: the actress Rose Ayling-Ellis and her professional partner Giovanni Pernice. Rose Ayling-Ellis is deaf. That she was able to master increasingly complicated dances while unable to hear much of the music at all was an extraordinary technical feat (with some of the credit going to Giovanni Pernice’s tutorship). But the most significant moment of the show came when this pair performed to Clean Bandit’s Symphony.

Halfway through the song, the music cut out and the audiences at home and in the studio found themselves in the same situtation as one of the performers: unable to hear the music. This moment of empathy would go on to win a BAFTA for the ‘Must-See Moment’ of 2022. And the dance as a whole scored 9, 10, 10, 10. It combined technical skill with sentimental power, and – yes – the only 9 was Craig Revel Horwood, maintaining his steadfast resistance to integrating sentimental criteria into his marking.

If that is how the judging works when performers succeed, you can also see something similar happening when they do less well. Fairly early in the series, a contestant called Judi Love offered her dance up as a tribute to a relative who had recently died. Such framing made it very difficult for the judges to criticize technical errors without sounding excessively harsh: the sentimental dimension was simply too strong for even Revel Horwood’s aura of pantomime villainy to overcome. However, this was the point in the series at which Mabuse came into her own as the most ‘sentimental’ of the judges: she could recognize the emotion of the moment but also – and exceptionally – comment on points of technique since it was clear that those observations were not a symptom of her inability to respond sentimentally to a performance.

If Judi Love exemplifies how a technical weakness (and sentimental strength) ended up being treated by the panel, then the fate of Tom Fletcher illustrates the contrary position. As the lead singer in McFly, Fletcher entered the show with high musicality and decent technique; sentiment was, however, his weak point. In the week of his elimination, he and his partner (Amy Dowden) performed to ‘On My Own’ from Les Misérables. There was a strong sentimental reason for this choice: Fletcher’s sister played Eponine and performed this song in the West End production, and he was dancing to it to honour her. But Fletcher was criticized by both Motsi and Enrivo for his lack of emotional engagement. And, given that Enrivo was replacing Revel Horwood (tilting the balance of the panel away form technique), this was a very bad week for a contestant to fail on sentiment.

The cases of Judi Love and Tom Fletcher aren’t quite parallel. Both contestants had great sentimental framing for their dances. Fletcher, however, didn’t show that sentimental side in his dancing; while Judi did. This means that my earlier sketch might need updating. The judges are not assessing some balance of technique and sentimental appeal; they are – to be as precise as possible – instead judging the extent to which both of these things are visible. In terms of technique, this means that an ambitious, complex sequence of moves (highly visible technical skill) might earn more points, even with small errors, than something safer – since the safer choreography shows less technical power. In terms of sentiment, it is not just enough to have a moving backstory, you have to show it too.

This is turning into a long post, so I’ll conclude it by wondering why the judging process of this TV show fascinated me so much. I think the sentimental-technical spectrum of the professional judges responds to two things. First, to the way that the public judge dance. Since the public lacks technical knowledge, then they will judge more sentimentally. The judges risk being seen as completely disconnected from the public (and so a potential negative for the show’s viewing figures) if they don’t register this at least partially. Second, the judges evaluate these performances in this way because they are judging art. Art is not purely the product of technique, but also the product of emotion. Without recognizing both, they cannot fully evaluate these performances as art.