A celebratory finale that was both a surprise and yet somehow inevitable brought many to tears
What a banner year this has been for Strictly Come Dancing. In recent series, the show had developed something of a recruitment problem – forced to make do with a talent pool of low-grade newsreaders and Holby City actors, due in part to its reputation for murdering marriages willy-nilly – but this is 2020, so the circumstances of its existence were a little different this time around.
Like Bake Off before it, this year star power took a backseat to the fact that Strictly even managed to exist at all. The whole operation had balanced on a knife-edge for months, with nobody quite knowing how to maintain Covid protocols for a show about people having to squish their bodies against barely dressed strangers for months at a time. So when the Strictly production team finally revealed that they had figured out how to pull it off, the sense of national gratitude was palpable.
