Strictly Come Dartmouth “W
e’ve been asked to be in Strictly Come Dartmouth this year,” my beautiful fiancée said. “Would you
be happy to do it?”
I looked at her – I thought back to the few times I’ve been asked to move my feet in a controlled and rhythmic manner, and my heart filled with dread.
“It’ll be fun!” Lesley said, and grinned her happiest grin. I was won over, and said yes.
Then we found out we were doing tango. Tango? Isn’t that the Latin one with passion, verve and drama? Me? A man who was once voted, on an exchange course in Holland, as the ‘Most English Person’ the group of international students had ever met?
By the end of a few glasses of wine, however, I had decided that we would watch a few vids on You Tube and ‘throw something together’. We put together a story: I would be a geek in a terrible outfit, trying to impress Lesley, she would dismiss me, I would then be stopped by a woman in a witch’s hat – played by our friend Sue - who would slap me, give me a potion to drink and I would suddenly become a Latin sensation and whisk Lesley off her feet with my Tango-ista style. It would be GREAT.
Then it was October and we found out Lesley and I doing the Tango – THE INSIDE STORY BY PHIL SCOBLE
our music would be Roxanne, but the version from Moulin Rouge. My, the song was serious: how could we do a jokey dance to THAT? We started looking at more info online about the Tango. Everything we found about it seemed to impress on us the history, drama and seriousness of this amazing dance. We looked at each other. Lesley spoke for both of us:
“We have to have some lessons.” We booked in with a teacher in
Torquay after a quick web search – and headed over there, incredibly nervous and worried we were going to get a shock. We did.
Our teacher was small, dapper and in his 80s. He had Views. “You don’t need to learn steps,” he said to Lesley, “you just have to be a rag doll in his arms. As in life, it’s the men who have to do the thinking.” I think the last bit was supposed to be a joke, but we were so taken aback we missed it.
Lesley asked a number of times to be taught steps - foolishly believing this would allow us to perform the dance better – and the answer she always received was our teacher grabbing her and dancing the steps, manhandling
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