Observations on the ballroom

It has been called the "Natasha Kaplinsky effect", the estimated half-million more people who have joined dance classes as a result of the BBC's reality-TV hit Strictly Come Dancing. In this programme, celebrities pair off with professional dancers and perform routines, before being voted off in turn by a combination of studio judges and a phone-in vote.

As the historian Ross McKibbin writes in his book Classes and Cultures, ballroom dancing has long been a political minefield. In the 1920s, dancing professionals tried to stamp out the "freakish" steps of jazz-inspired crazes such as the Charleston and the Varsity Drag, which threatened to "turn the ballroom into a bear garden". For the editor of the Dancing Times, excessive liberty on the dance floor had produced "artistic Bolshevism". So the Official Board of Ballroom Dancing sanctioned only four official dances - waltz, foxtrot, quickstep and tango - and outlawed illegal steps, lifts and sidekicks.

The easily understood steps of this "new English style" were essentially egalitarian, allowing formal dancing to extend beyond the big costume balls of the London season to the mass democracy of the Mecca ballroom. But it was always more about individual skill than social solidarity. Mass-Observation claimed that anti-fascists broke up a demonstration by Walter Mosley's Blackshirts by "doing the Lambeth Walk", and suggested that this improvised, communal dance could teach us "something about the future of democracy". But the Lambeth Walk was frowned on by professional bodies, along with other collective endeavours such as the conga and the hokey-cokey.

The ruling bodies were also terrified that dancing might be mistaken for sublimated sex. One dance teacher lamented "the admission of jazz music and dubious steps into decent places", insisting that they originated "in low Negro haunts and had au fond a prurient significance". So the gentleman's hold had to be standardised, the hips straightened and the knees kept firmly together.

The modern English style was one of imperialism's last hurrahs, spreading unopposed throughout most of the world. In his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recalls being inspired by his idol Victor Silvester, spending much of his student days in the early 1940s practising foxtrots and waltzes to a crackly phonograph record. Silvester's seminal textbook Modern Ballroom Dancing (1927), which has just been reissued on the back of the latest dance revival, claims that the basic principles of ballroom are "as permanent as the law of gravity". Like the rules of cricket - another colonial export - ballroom dancing was governed by formal codes and tacit rules, unintelligible outside of its own, self-contained universe.

The movements of the contestants on Strictly Come Dancing now seem wholly unnatural, with their backs as straight as poles, their heads turned away from each other and their facial expressions fixed in a rictus. No one dances like this unless told to, and indeed the judges are always telling contestants off for improvising steps and doing "illegal" lifts. But hang on: the celebrities are also told to dance with "heart" and "passion". They are congratulated on their "expressive spines" and their "X-rated sambas". And they are allowed to do newer, upstart dances such as the jive and the salsa. There is nothing "strict" about that.

In any case, the judges are pantomime villains, booed when they dare to express a negative opinion and ignored by the viewers, who vote for the celebrities for reasons that are only partly to do with dance steps. The programme seems unsure whether dancing is a sport, an art form or (as per the reality-TV cliche) an opportunity for psychotherapeutic exploration among its participants. This is the touchy-feely ballroom: everyone is a judge, and all must have prizes. The founders of the modern English style must be doing angry reverse turns in their graves.

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