Dancing on Wheels 1st episode

It seems I got the format slightly wrong in my last post: the set-up is this:

Britain has until now never entered into the European Wheelchair Ballroom Dancing Championship. The objective of the series is to find a couple to represent Britain in the next competition.

The wheelchair dancers are all novices to dancing, but have been wheelchair users for some time (the shortest has been for 18 months after becoming paralysed). The temporarily-able-bodied dancers are all celebrities who either appeared on Strictly Come Dancing or else have dancing training due to their showbiz background.

Brian Fortuna has been an expert teacher of wheelchair ballroom dancing for 8 years and it seems as though this show is a serious project of his. Throughout the show his involvement in making it work and evangelising the power, beauty and athleticism of wheelchair dancing was palpable.

He made a clear statement of intent early on in the programme, while talking to the six wheelchair users who were selected to take part: "I don't want this to be about pity ... I want the audience to be like, 'Wow, I never even knew that was possible!'"

The wheelchair users were then introduced to their celeb partners, as follows:

James (a professional carer) was partnered with TV presenter Caroline Flack
Simone (a recent graduate) was partnered with Hollyoaks actor Kevin Sacre
Harry (described as recently married) was partnered with singer Michelle Gayle
Diana (described as mother of one) was partnered with swimmer Mark Foster
Carolyne (a bar worker) was partnered with Rugby League star Martin Offiah
Paul (a mechanical design engineer) was partnered with singer Heather Small

(For those who are interested, these broke down on race as 1 Black wheelchair user and 3 Black celebs; there were no Asian dancers)

There was footage of Brian Fortuna demonstrating how to use the athletics wheelchairs that are used for dancing, and of some of the celebrities trying out the chairs as well, to get a better idea of what forces are involved in controlling them.

Now, I'm not a wheelchair user myself, and not disabled, so my perceptions may not be fair. However, what I thought I saw during the course of this episode was a very positive representation of disabled folks with a genuine sense that the focus was on the person, not the disability: personalities, relationships and interactions were the important parts of how the show was put together as the cameras followed the first four weeks of training leading up to the first competition.

One thing that absolutely impressed me was how well Fortuna works as a teacher and as a coach. He definitely seemed to know how to get the best from his students, even when they were being awkward (as of course, a couple of them were).

Eventually, it came to the actual competition. I feel as though we weren't always given the best angle to watch the dancing itself, because as the culmination of the introductory training period it's understandable that the programme makers wanted to focus on the human story as much as on the technical aspects of the dancing. Nevertheless, what were were shown was absolutely impressive and I think Fortuna's mission statement is going to be achieved very easily during this series.

The judges were husband-and-wife professional dancers from Strictly Come Dancing, James and Ola Jordan, along with paralympics athlete and TV presenter Ade Adepitan. It might have been nice if the BBC had found a way to get at least one professional wheelchair dancer into the judges line-up but equally you can see why they might have found it hard to find an English-speaking pro to take the job (since Britain doesn't have anyone entering the European competition...!) So finding someone to comment on the technical chair work as well as people to comment on the dance aspects of the performances was probably the best they could manage. In fact, at one point Adepitan commented on the lack of experience that his fellow judges had with assessing the technical aspects of wheelchair dance, talking how they missed crucial elements of the chair control in one routine.

I was disappointed when the judges eliminated Carolyne and Martin, because I thought they did really well and they were one of the more enjoyable couples to watch in the build-up footage as well.

I absolutely loved Diana and Mark's tango, they were awesome by any measure I thought. Some of the others you might say "awesome considering it's only their first go" but their performance was awesome full-stop.