AMANDA PLATELL: Shirley Ballas should be kicked off Strictly – not Pete Wicks. But we all know why she voted him out…

Reality TV star Pete Wicks shouldn’t have been kicked off Strictly. It should have been head judge Shirley Ballas who walked. She is now the dance show’s weakest link.

We devoted Strictly superfans knew that when Pete ended up in the dance-off this weekend that the judges would vote him out however well he performed, and despite him having millions of supporters.

Once again, Shirley and fellow judges Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse and Anton Du Beke all chose to save their favourite, Love Island’s Tasha Ghouri. Even though she had ballet lessons as a child and graduated with a first-class honours degree in Dance Performance from the Creative Academy in Berkshire.

According to her CV she has competed at major dance events in the past, specialising in ‘commercial’, a broader dance style popularly seen in music videos or onstage in music tours.

The point is that Pete had never danced a step in his life before Strictly and is the embodiment of the show’s original promise of teaching complete novices the magic of the ballroom.

Still the judges seemed determined to vote him off, despite Shirley telling Pete: ‘You remind us of what this competition is about, so you give it your all and you don’t give up. You are absolutely Mr Strictly Come Dancing.’

Shirley Ballas and fellow judges all chose to save their favourite, Love Island’s Tasha Ghouri, over dance novice Pete Wicks and his dance partner Jowita Pryztal

‘Shirley seems to have forgotten that it is we viewers and fans – rather than her – who should decide the fate of the dancers’

Why then did she vote to get rid of him in favour of a woman who was already a professional dancer?

Shirley represents something really rotten at the heart of today’s Strictly, a  bias against the amateurs who once made it great – including the first winner Natasha Kaplisky who was a complete novice.

I blame all the judges but especially Shirley who has come to believe she is the star of the show.

She seems to have forgotten that it is we viewers and fans – rather than her – who should decide the fate of the dancers.

On Sunday, the Mail’s showbusiness supremo Katie Hind revealed that Strictly judges were ‘furious’ that the most talented celebrity dancers were being booted out by viewers in their millions while the less able ones stayed in, thanks to the public votes.

Their concerns were made plain after Pete Wicks and the programme’s first blind contestant, comedian Chris McCausland, 47, made it through to the semi-finals. They feared Strictly was no longer a dance show but a ‘popularity contest’.

And what’s wrong with that? Surely it should be a popularity contest – not least because the production company and the BBC make a small fortune out of the show as viewers have to pay to vote.

What out-of-touch snobs these judges have become, sneering at dance novices Pete and Chris.

Pete Wicks and Jowita dance their last dance on Strictly – an Argentine tango to Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve

‘The judges concerns were made plain after Pete Wicks and the programme’s first blind contestant, comedian Chris McCausland, pictured, made it through to the semi-finals’

An insider tried to explain it from the judges point of view: ‘They are dancers and choreographers. Their entire careers – and lives – have been about being the best and the very best of dancing.

‘So to see the show becoming about who likes who the most, rather than the quality of their dancing… you could say it’s rather depressing.’

Not half as depressing as watching the sour-puss judges favouring experienced dancers and rewarding them with perfect-10 paddle boards while sneeringly marking down the novices.

BBC insiders say ‘those at the top’ of the show are so worried about the quality of dancing this time round that ‘it has caused a bit of a crisis’. They believe we are now looking at a final ‘where the dancing is nowhere up to the standards it usually is, but instead has celebrities that people actually want watching’.

But that’s surely the whole point of the show: viewers voting for the dancers they want.

Perhaps Shirley secretly fears she’ll be voted off Strictly by BBC bosses. Perhaps that’s why she’s resorted to wearing ever-more outlandish outfits, dressing up like singer Cher, for instance. And what’s with all the sexual innuendos? After Pete Wicks performed in crotch-hugging trousers and she started fanning herself, saying: ‘I don’t think I’m going to forget this evening for as long as I live, darling.’

She’s in her mid-60s, for heaven’s sake, while Pete’s 36. And it’s hardly the best way to boost a show that’s lost millions of viewers.

After the psychodrama of actress Amanda Abbington’s accusations against Giovanni Pernice, our favourite show needs a period of calm, to get back to basics and to its fundamental promise of making graceful swans out of ugly-duckling novice dancers.

By booting out Pete Wicks the Strictly judges misread the living rooms of their more than six million viewers. That’s down from 10.2million in 2020 and 13.1million in 2017, when Shirley Ballas took the helm. She’s currently on a staggering £500,00 per series, compared to her pre-decessor Len Goodman’s £120,000.

Surely BBC bosses must have done the maths. If there were any justice it would not have been Pete who was voted off Strictly this year, but the woman who has presided over the fastest decline in what was once the jewel of the BBC’s Saturday-night viewing.