Chris McCausland makes Wonka joke to Cynthia Erivo
Vanessa Feltz has sensationally accused the bosses of Strictly Come Dancing of deliberately engineering Chris McCausland’s elimination from the competition. The former contestant, 62, suggested that the recent Sambathon twist was unfairly stacked against the comedian.
Chris, 47, made history as the first blind contestant to take part in the hit BBC One show, however, during last week's show he became the first contestant to be eliminated from the dreaded Sambathon. Fans have already slammed the shake-up, and Vanessa, who competed on the show in 2013, didn’t hold back in a new video posted on her YouTube channel.
The veteran broadcaster claimed: “The bosses at the BBC, I mean the senior producers and all the people in charge of the programme, when they want to get rid of you, they have ways of dislodging you. One is the music that they choose to make you dance to.
The other is the VT, the videotape of what you've been doing that week. The other, of course, is the costume—you could look like a right prannit. And when you look like a prannit, people don't vote for you. There's all that going on.”
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Vanessa continued by accusing the show’s producers of stacking the deck against Chris and his partner Dianne Buswell by introducing the Sambathon.
“Was it fair to put them in this context? Was it fair, or was it just a way of giving Chris the fewest points, moving him down the leaderboard and saying without saying goodbye, sayonara, farewell? I think that that Sambathon was unfair to Chris and Dianne. I did not like it as I saw it happening,” she declared.
The This Morning presenter said she believed the challenge was “not a level playing field” for the blind comedian, who couldn’t see the other contestants’ movements.
“It’s incredibly difficult for anyone to negotiate a dance-a-thon when you don’t know where the people that you’re dancing in competition with are going,” Vanessa explained.
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“You don't know where they're headed, you haven’t seen their choreography, you haven’t had a chance to practice altogether on the floor.”
She added: “When you can see everything that’s going on, it’s still incredibly difficult to avoid a collision. When, like Chris, you cannot see, you do not have the power of sight. Can you imagine how difficult that was for him and for Dianne? Dianne is trying to negotiate, to navigate, not to crash into anybody, and lo and behold, who went out first in the Sambathon? Chris and Dianne!”
Vanessa’s fiery comments didn’t stop there. “I told you, when the bosses on Strictly have had enough of you, they have ways of making you leave,” she ranted. “I don’t want these left-field obstacles flung in his path. It’s not fair.”
Chris, who has won widespread admiration for breaking barriers on the show, bowed out gracefully despite the controversy. Meanwhile, the BBC and Strictly Come Dancing have yet to respond to the allegations.
