Denis: Will Strictly Ballroom result in no more sports heroes?

Mar 17 2009 By Denis Kilcommons

BLAME Darren Gough. The cricket star was the first male winner of Strictly Come Dancing and suddenly boys started practising the quick step as assiduously as they had been perfecting the side-step.

Or you could blame Gordon Brown. Two years ago he said all pupils should have five hours physical activity a week and schools began promoting dance as one of the ways of getting a sweat on.

Now Arts Council research shows that dance lessons are second only to football in popularity in Britain’s schools and the numbers choosing dance has risen 83% in four years.

By heck, but times certainly have changed.

In my day physical activity in school came from rugby, soccer, cricket and gym work adapted by sports master Flash Harry from a manual by the Spanish Inquisition.

Mind you, I think my school might have had problems with dance lessons seeing as all the pupils were boys. Even the perpetual sick-note lads at PE would have opted to get their plimsolls on rather than attempt the paso doble with Smith Minor from the Lower Third – the one with the personal hygiene problem.

Girls might have been able to take ballet at school, but if boys wanted to learn how to dance they had to take lessons privately.

This, of course, was in the days when there were only two types of dance – ballroom and jive and no one taught jive. Even boys with no sense of rhythm learned how to stand on a dance floor on one leg while the other twitched and the girl spun round like a dervish.

It’s not that I’m against dance, just that there is a time and a place for it, and that time should not encroach on proper sporting activity.