Oh dear, I'm blogging about a reality TV show again. This must stop. But not now.
Well, I'm feeling slightly smug that my "what will happen" prediction was absolutely spot-on, but I must admit that Tom's showdance was a gnat's whisker ahead of Rachael's. Ultimately though the point is that Tom shouldn't have even been in the final - the judge's scores in the semifinal meant that he should have been in a dance-off with one of the other couples, after which he would almost certainly have left the competition.
I was very much in favour of the BBC's decision at the time to allow all three couples through, since viewers' votes could not stop Tom being in the dance-off. But that alone was not why I supported the decision - the reason for my support was because the presenters had urged the public to "vote if you want to save your faviourite from the dance-off" - yet no amount of viewers' votes for Tom could have done that, so the BBC had to change something or they would have misled viewers.
The key point is, where was the mistake? It was not in the voting system, it was in the fact that viewers were urged to do something that, in effect, was impossible. Lesson learned, won't happen again.
Until the Christmas episode was filmed, that is, when this happened.
But here the BBC made completely the wrong decision. They changed the system to fiddle the results, so that those who didn't stand a chance of winning (because the judges marked them so low that the audience vote wouldn't be sufficient) suddenly did again. Well, so what? As long as the audience were informed that voting for the bottom two couples would be a wasted vote, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the system as it stood.
Any student of basic game theory will tell you that there is no perfect voting system. Any system of scoring and counting votes can be manipulated, result in ties, etc. In my book it's wholly correct that the judges and audience share half the vote each, and the scoring system they use is fine by me. But that does mean that sometimes the audience will be powerless to save their favourite, or for their favourite to win. That's no bad thing; often the judges know better and what's the point of having them if their opinion is to be undermined by the producers rigging the voting system every time they don't like the result?
