Chris McCausland is the comic who may save sickly Strictly… he should have pay doubled for stopping launch show torture ngocc

DUNNO what the BBC’s paying comedian Chris McCausland to take part in Strictly Come Dancing this year, but it’s not nearly enough.

They could double it, in fact, and it would still fall some way short.

Because, in under two hours, Chris didn’t just take the sting out of the ­bullying scandal, he stopped the grinding torture of the launch show as well.

No small achievement. For if there’s a more empty, mis- leading, pointless, over-hyped, gushing, insincere non-event in the TV calendar, then it’s definitely Transfer Deadline Day.

Strictly’s pairing-up shenanigans comes a close second though, and got off to the worst possible start on Saturday, with a routine that looked like controversial returnee ­Aljaz Skorjanec had abducted the other survivors on The Vengabus.

It didn’t get any less unsettling once he’d dumped them at the studio, where it swiftly became clear there was a significant gender imbalance with the numbers, which might not have been unconnected to the Giovanni Pernice and Graziano Di Prima fallout.

Nine male celebrities, but just six women, Toyah Willcox, Sarah Hadland, Sam Quek, Montell Douglas off Gladiators, Dr Punam Krishan (who?) and professionally trained dancer Tasha Ghouri, who all gave off such an air of desperation you got the impression they’d have paid to take part, even if Strictly had paired them up with Abu Hamza and still jumped into his stumps screaming: “I was hoping for you.”

The blokes didn’t play it totally cool either, obviously. Least of all “singer and actor” Shayne Ward, who’s in it to win it and introduced himself as “The lead in The Good Ship Murder”, like it was Titus Andronicus at The Globe Theatre.

The real 2024 gold, however, was to be found somewhere among the satisfyingly long list of male celebrities who very obviously can’t dance at all.

I’m thinking here of Towie’s Pete Wicks, Wynne Evans, from the Go Compare adverts, and terror-stricken footballer Paul Merson, who looked like he was about to enter a civil partnership with Duncan “Chase Me” Norvelle, on Saturday rather than do a pat-a-cake routine in the group dance.

Merse is very fragile indeed. Not an accusation you could ever throw at DIY SOS host Nick Knowles, who claimed he had “very humble beginnings”, but has certainly been making up for it since then.

To the point he cannot now see a TV camera without explaining: “I’m literally the least talented member of my family,” lest we confuse him with Sir David Attenborough.

Lucky for Nick, Shayne and everyone else on Strictly, then, that the line-up also includes Chris McCausland who’s a welcome presence and corrective, given Strictly’s last high-profile blind guest was The Voice winner Andrea Begley who sang — and I swear I’m not making this up — Dancing In The Dark.

Chris is also that rarest of creatures on TV these days — a funny comedian who can actually make an audience laugh just by ­butting into Claudia’s interviews with Dr Punam to say: “None of us can believe we’ve managed to get in the same room as a GP.”

There’s not a hint of self-pity about him either, as Chris demonstrated when he claimed his partner Dianne Buswell was: “Absolutely over the moon to get me because she wants November off.”

It was all part of a show-stealing appearance that transformed the atmosphere of the occasion — although it may still be too soon to describe him as Strictly’s “saviour”.

Saturday’s launch was a ­million viewers down on last year’s and the series is still lumbered with a host, Tess Daly, who cannot ad-lib-a-single gesture, and a suicidal desire to neutralise the barbs of Craig Revel Horwood, who is often the only person that stops Strictly melting into sickly self-parody.

But hey, if they can get Chris McCausland to quick-step around to Pinball Wizard, it might just be worth watching (BBC1, tomorrow, 7pm).

Failway is real sleeper

OH no. A carriage full of Scottish character actors are stuck on the driverless Glasgow to London sleeper train and it’s hurtling, out of control, towards the border.

There’s Trevor from EastEnders, Peaky Blinder Joe Cole, Game Of Thrones’ James Cosmo, the woman from The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, who’s now pretending to be the Government’s Transport Secretary.

And only Frank Gallagher, off Shameless, can now save them.
My thoughts, then, are with the cast of BBC1’s Nightsleeper, a drama which appears to be based on a classic Thomas The Tank Engine episode called Rusty And The Boulder and finds the world’s least ambitious terrorist blackmailers demanding £10millionor they’ll reduce Britain’s rail network to chaos, which is about a billion less than Aslef would get to achieve exactly the same thing.

So I’d have caved in to their demands by the end of episode two, just to spare us four more hours of a script that does nobody any favours.

It’s 95 per cent disaster movie cliche and techno-garble, but peppered with some earnestly out of date political propaganda about the Government and rail privatisation (Scotrail’s nationalised) and funny name-checks for random Scottish locations like Wishaw, Carstairs and Ardrossan South Beach which, if you haven’t visited it, is a lot like South Beach Miami, but with fewer mobility scooters and more three-legged cats.

Understandably, then, the cast are getting a little tetchy on the train. Trevor from EastEnders is still trying to pick fights with everyone, somebody else has just adlibbed the line “What a bag of s***e,” and James Cosmo’s dropped a stat, in the Scottish borders, which requires critical updating.