This Saturday’s Strictly Come Dancing final will be in two parts:
- At the start of the show, before any dancing takes place, all three couples will have their scores carried over from last week. This includes not only last week’s judges’ scores (in which Tom and Camilla placed last), but also the results of last week’s public phone votes (which will be revealed on the night).
- After the first set of dances, the judges’ new votes, plus the new set of public phone votes, will be added to last week’s scores. The lowest scoring couple will be eliminated.
- At the start of Part Two, later in the evening, the remaining two couples will dance again, with the winner decided solely by a new public phone vote.
This means that Tom and Camilla will start the first part of the show with a potentially major disadvantage – so the phone votes are all-important. No matter how well or how badly Tom and Camilla do on the judges’ scores on Saturday, they will still need the public’s support.
For the Strictly geeks amongst you, the planned voting system announced yesterday does not exclude the possibility of last week’s fiasco happening again…
The BBC plan to score the first part of the Finals by combining last week’s judges’ score and phone votes with Saturday’s judges’ score and phone votes, in the following fashion:
In the interests of complete transparency we are taking the unprecedented step of revealing the marks allocated as a result of the audience vote from Saturday’s show during the first of the two final shows (1840hrs). These scores will be added to those from the judges from last week.
This combined score will be announced on the leader board at the top of the first show. Our three couples will then dance and the judges will score them. The audience will vote on those performances in the usual manner. These results will be added to the leader board and the couple with the lowest overall score will leave the competition. In the second show the remaining two couples will start from scratch and go head to head with a public vote to decide who will be crowned Strictly Come Dancing Champion 2008. Only the viewing public will determine the winner.
This gives the following possible ranges of scores in the elimination of the first couple from the finals:
| Tom & Camilla | Lisa & Brendan | Rachel & Vincent | |
| Judges Semi-finals (definite) | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| Public Semi-finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| At start of Finals (possible range) | 2 – 4 | 4 – 6 | 4 – 6 |
| Judges first part of Finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| Public first part of Finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| Couple with lowest score does not go on to the second part of the Finals (possible range) | 4 – 10 | 6 – 12 | 6 – 12 |
However, God Forbid, if we have the same outcome with Tom at the bottom of the Judges’ score board and the other two couples come joint first, Tom will need to be top of the public vote both weeks to even stand a chance of tying for bottom place:
| Tom & Camilla | Other Couples | |
| Judges Semi-finals (definite) | 1 | 3 |
| Public Semi-finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| At start of Finals (possible range) | 2 – 4 | 4 – 6 |
| Judges first part of Finals (if repeat of last week) | 1 | 3 |
| Public first part of Finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| Couple with lowest score does not go on to the second part of the Finals (possible range) | 4 – 8 | 8 – 11 |
There is a further problem with this in that if Tom was not top of the public’s voting last Saturday, we don’t know if this genuinely reflects public opinion or is a result of people, like many here in Parwich, not voting because we could see it was a wasted vote. If he has not scored the maximum on last Saturday’s public vote, there will still be at least one worst case possible judges’ scoring scenario when no matter how many people vote for him this Saturday he will not get through to the second part of the finals and the semi-final fiasco is repeated:
| Tom & Camilla | Other Couples | |
| Judges Semi-finals (definite) | 1 | 3 |
| Public Semi-finals (possible range) | 1 – 2 | 1 – 3 |
| At start of Finals (possible range) | 2 – 3 | 4 – 6 |
| Judges first part of Finals (if repeat of last week) | 1 | 3 |
| Public first part of Finals (possible range) | 1 – 3 | 1 – 3 |
| Total: Couple with lowest score does not go on to the second part of the Finals (possible range) | 4 – 7 | 8 – 12 |
Hopefully the BBC have seen this and have only gone with this system knowing that Tom was top of the semi-finals public vote. Ideally they should make the result of last week’s public vote known now, not on Saturday’s Show.
PARWICH.ORG 
Ties in the latter rounds might not be as unlikely as you might think, see Strictly Come Dancing Voting: The Maths – More or Less – BBC Radio 4.
So it is not impossible that we will see this problem repeated, especially in semi-finals and finals where the differences in the judges’ scores between the couples is likely to be less.
In yet a further interesting twist last week’s scores and this week’s judges’ scores have been merged, by adding them together to create a leader board, then being re-scored with the couple in first place being given 3 points and so on down.
Again this puts Lisa/Brendan and Rachel/Vincent in joint first with 3 points and Tom in last with 1 point.
Tom now only stands a chance if he gains the most phone votes, which means he will tie in second place. Then he will go through to the second part of the finals, as in the event of a tie the couple with the greatest public vote will go through.
Less than top in the phone vote and Tom is out.
So, victory is just within his grasp – but only by a whisker.
Come on Tom! One last push! 🙂