Review: Dancing on Ice – It’s All A Bit Shocking & Wrong

Dancing on Ice may have spent the entire series trying to keep up with the rapid pace of reality TV but really we all know that it's wonderfully behind the times. Which is presumably why they decided to do a Circus themed night, years after Britney and Take That briefly brought those arenas of freakery and animal cruelty back to everyone's attention.

The excuse for being so woefully out-of-touch? It was props week, and obviously they couldn't just give people a few props to skate with without trying to tie the whole thing together with an overarching theme. Even though that's exactly what they've done every other year.

They needn't have bothered though, because Louie Spence was determined to make the show all about him and his potentially incorrect opinions and supposedly shockingly low marks. Unfortunately for Louie, though, the rest of the celebs were determined to be equally shocking and appalling.

First to destroy everything that we thought we knew about the world was Chemmy, who is apparently funny. You get that? She's not manic and irritating, she's funny. At least that's what the judging panel said, although maybe they had to say it because they were scared that she'd kill them with her props if they didn't.

If fairness to the judges, Crazy-Eyes did have enough props to be able to spare a couple for some bludgeoning. She had six. SIX props, the greedy bint. And she managed not to drop any of them, which was just about the only thing she could do which would make us dislike her more. Honestly, she was set right up for looking like an idiot, and she entirely let us down.

Competing with Chemmy for our ire, though, was the costume department. Who decided that Chico's strong man-themed routine definitely required that he wore a leotard. Yes, that's correct. They decided that we all needed to become over-familiar with his glans, so we have absolutely nothing to say about his routine because were too busy trying blind ourselves with whatever we could find under the kitchen sink.

We weren't the only ones inflicting pain on ourselves though. Matt was joining us in self-harm mode, as he indulged his masochistic tendencies and whipped himself in the balls on national TV. He was meant to be a lion tamer, but really the whole thing was just an excuse for shocking new levels of depravity as Katarina started talking about "toys" and everyone in the studio was a little bit sick in their mouths.

Jennifer Ellison, meanwhile, was skating to her son's favourite song. And was apparently determined to ruin it for him. Firstly she dressed as a clown – which everyone knows is just creepy and wrong – and then she decided to stomp on her partner's stomach. In her ice skate.

Young Jennifer, it seems, was worried that stomping on someone with a blade might cause his innards to explode all over the ice-rink and so spent much of her VT looking a bit scared and never actually doing it. So we were expecting intestines to spread all over the ice when she finally did it in the live show.

They didn't. We were upset.

Then there was Jorgie, who everyone knows is apparently brilliant. Everyone, that is, except for Louie. Who was apparently out to destroy her. He gave her a 6.5, and then took great, great pleasure in pointing out that it wasn't an error and that he actually thought she was a bit shit and that her ribbon-twirling was a bit dull and pointless.

And so the former skating queen found herself at the bottom of the leaderboard, but not in the skate-off. No, that honour went to Chico and Chemmy, because Chico's lycra-clad penis wasn't quite horrifying enough the first time round.

Or at all, it seems, because those baffling judges looked Chico right in the groin and then saved him. Thus condemning us all to yet more lycra-clad horror, and themselves to a slow and painful death-by-manic-skier.