Dirty Dancing

One sewage worker who refused to drop the ball(room).

It opens on Strictly Come Dancing (except that for copyright reasons, they have to call it Quickly Go Prancing). The dresses are dazzling, the moves astounding, the choreography captivating. We’re under a spell. A spell broken by one word spoken in a broad Yorkshire accent: “Trannie”. The camera then homes in on a blokey bloke. We know this because he’s wearing a dirty white vest and drinking a can of supermarket own brand lager that’s spelt with an ‘r’, so that it actually reads ‘larger’. (The can is also slightly bigger than is standard, making it a very clever pun.) 

Then another voice is heard. “I think they look amazing”. Then the original voice again, “Shut yer cake ‘ole Johnny, you sound like one of them bumbandits”. So we know now that Johnny’s dad doesn’t like dancing or, apparently, people who are gay. Right there and then, Johnny decides his love of dancing must be hidden and they both get ready for work.

Like all Yorkshire men in films (apart from pretend ones like Patrick Stewart), they’re manual labourers and wear a flat cap at all times — even though this is highly impractical for their job in the sewage plant. We also discover Johnny’s nickname is ‘Captain’ — a derogatory moniker given by the other lads, as Johnny’s job is to fish out all the particularly chunky lumps in the sewage before it’s processed into Carling Extra Cold.

But one day, everything changes. And he fishes out a tiara. It’s caked in faecal matter, both human and animal (Johnny can now tell the difference between last night’s madras and a well-digested tin of Pedigree Chum from 50 paces). But as he washes the tiara, it unlocks ambitions of becoming a dancer.

[DANCING QUEEN BY ABBA PLAYS WITH NO VOCALS, JUST THE HAUNTING MELODY]

He rushes home but the only dance he knows is ‘Saturday Night’ by Whigfield. He soon realises this is the musical domain of the 40^th birthday party (or ‘do’, being in the north of England). So he looks for a dance teacher in the Yellow Pages (Yorkshire being the last remaining place where the paper version exists). He has to do this without his dad knowing, as he’s shouting at Quickly Go Prancing again. It’s not made clear as to why he keeps watching it to be honest.

[THE FIRST MEETING WITH THE DANCE TEACHER]

Johnny’s dance teacher doesn’t have a studio. Then he has a lightbulb moment (he calls it this because he once had a great idea that involved using old lightbulbs as a pestle, but sadly, his crushed herbs mixed with tiny shards of broken glass and resulted in significant blood loss. In hindsight, it’s not a great analogy). He suggests the sewage works! He doesn’t really question why a dance teacher would advertise if they had no space, as the practice location will probably be part of the plot.

[SCENE OF THEM CREEPING INTO THE SEWAGE WORKS FOR THE FIRST LESSON]

You’d expect him to be rubbish but as the film has already been on a while, things are speeded up a bit. He’s pretty good and soon they’re tripping the light fantastic in a dark sewage works — the moonlight glinting off the chunks in the brown soup. Then they hear something! But it’s fine, it’s just late-night doggers and we all have a good laugh about it. The only person who doesn’t is the dance teacher. She cries and tells Johnny that her old dancing partner was a prolific dogger who accidently trapped his babymakers in the car door, rendering him unable to dance again. All on the eve of the Quickly Go Prancing trials. This is great news for us as viewers, as until now, the film hasn’t really had a plot as such. The silence hangs in the air (with the exception of the occasional car horn accidently pressed by a clammy rogue dogger’s buttock) before he suggests they try out for it.

[MONTAGE WHERE JOHNNY QUICKLY LEARNS THE ESSENTIAL MACARENA, LAS KETCHUP AND GANGNAM STYLE DANCES]

All the classics tunes come out, from ‘Love Man’ to ‘I’ve Had The Time Of My Life’. Except the filmmakers couldn’t afford the licensing, so each one is a cover by Steve Brookstein. Still, it’s a beautiful sight and for no real reason, they decide to practice in the water. If the dances had lifts in, this might be an obvious choice, but for the Viennese Waltz, it seems mere folly. And as they’re in an isolated town, the only place with water deep enough is the processing plant. Watching them jostle around in human waste of varying degrees of viscosity is actually quite harrowing. The two leads don’t seem to care though. And it’s clear a romance is developing between them when Johnny emerges from the sewage water with a used condom he’s found in it and says (with a cheeky wink), “Fancy another johnnie instead?”. They both laugh raucously at the hilarious joke.

Then they walk home to shower and in an act of gallantry, Johnny carries her shopping. She’s done a ‘big shop’ so has loads, especially as Tesco are heavily promoting the ‘five pieces of fruit a day’ thing, and Johnny is secretly a bit gutted he offered to carry a watermelon. Still, after throwing shapes in truly mucky water, it seems the least of the strange things he’s done that night.

We’ve had trials, tribulations and a lengthy montage. So you’d think that after all that, there’d be a proper ending. Nope. What actually happens is they go to the sewage works and do some more dirty dancing in front of Johnny’s parents and a few of their friends. That’s it.

[CREDITS ROLL]