Allthough most of the material in this interview concerns the original British show Strictly Come Dancing, the beginning of this video clip will give you a little insight into the English/Italian judge Bruno Tonioli.

Incidently, I was reading Bruno's biography on BBC's website, and found out that he was one of the dancers on Elton John's I'm Still Standing music video. With a quick YouTube search, I located this video and indeed saw Bruno in it. Here is the frame where he clearly appears:

It is at 2:00 minutes into the video:

Well now that Dancing With The Stars season 3 is over, I got some free time to create a page for the British version of the show - Strictly Come Dancing. The page looks exactly the same as my Dancing With The Stars videos page. The videos are created by other people and are stored on YouTube.

One thing you can notice is that the judges in the British show are much more harsh. They rarely give a 10 and 2s and 3s are quite frequent. I don't think the level of dancing in the British version is worse than in the American one.

Also what's interesting is that their Results Show is on the same day as the Performance show, just about 3 hours later. Then on the following night they have another show called It Takes Two where they take interviews of the dancers.

Why did Emmitt decide to participate in Dancing With The Stars?

Access Hollywood predicts...

The head judge of Dancing With The Stars Len Goodman has exhaustively used food metaphors in his critique of the dancers. Getting into his frame of mind, I created this illustration of a social dance event last weekend.

Here is an old clip from the beginning of Joey Lawrence's career from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Funny when asked if he had ever heard of Gene Kelly or Fred Astair and he said "no". Little did he know he would be dancing to "Singing in the Rain" just like Gene Kelly did.

This morning Emmitt Smith, Cheryl Burk, Mario Lopez and Karina Smirnoff appeared on Regis & Kelly Show. Hmm, the question of whether Mario would dance again with Karina got unanswered...

This show aired on September 12, 2006

Has Mario taken any dance classes before Dancing With The Stars? Find out...

This show aired on September 26, 2006

I guess Emmitt and Cheryl could not have stayed up partying all night to celebrate their championship, since the next morning they had to appear on Good Morning America along with Mario and Karina. Unfortunately last night I forgot to set my DVR to record the entire show, so I only was able to record the last bit after I woke up and realized that they are on the show. Not sure if they appeared earlier than this segment or not.

Anyway, here is a chance to see Emmitt and Mario in a social dance setting. I have to say it may take several weeks to learn one particular routine for a competition or performance, but it takes much longer to be able to do ad-lib partner dancing.

Here is the footage that I missed.

Well Cheryl has done it again! Congratulations to both Emmitt and her for taking the trophy. I kinda had a feeling that they could win as soon as I saw Emmitt getting 9's in week 5 and also based on the amount of votes he got from the visitors of my blog. In my opinion Emmitt came a long way from not having any dance experience. Although he is not as good of a dancer as Mario, I give him credit for getting through the learning curve.

Well another season is over! I can finally do other things on Tuesday and Wednesday nights than editing the videos :). I appreciate all the positive and supportive comments from the visitors of this blog. I am happy that so many people find the information presented here useful.

Emmitt Smith and Mario Lopez with their professional partners appeared on Oprah Winfrey show in the afternoon before the Season 3 Finale Results Show of Dancing With The Stars.

On October 30th TV Tatter published an interview with Carrie Ann Inaba.

A couple of days ago I received an email from a fellow DWTS fan Debbie who described her experience being present at the actual show. With her permission I am posting an excerpt from her email:

A couple of weeks back I was at one of the Wednesday results shows (the one where they had the professionals do a group jive number.) Then last week a friend got notified that she could get tickets for a Tuesday taping. Needless to say, there was no question we were going.

It's a cool experience to attend. Both times I was seated on the main floor center, however, the best seats (and those where folks may be on camera) are reserved for the VIPs and family members of the stars. There's also balcony seating on either side. (My friends were up there.)

We were seated very close to Emmitt's contingent. Lots of big burly football players! His wife is exquisitely beautiful! At the results show I attended, Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin stood next to me before he got dressed to dance and they watched the jive number. Kind of blew me away. Also, at that time Sara Evans was still on, and as we were leaving the studio area and I was driving 'round a corner, there she was standing on the street corner, talking on her cell phone, just like any gal on the street. I couldn't resist calling out to her, "Sara, we love you!" She smiled and said thanks. (I didn't think she was that good of a dancer, but I'm a GREAT fan of her music.) Too bad all her personal problems got in the way.

Truthfully, the camera was right in front of us on and off throughout the evening so at times it blocked our view, but we just craned our necks and oooed and ahhed. The show airs live to the east coast so they started taping at 5 our time. When I went to the Wednesday results show, they did pre-tape the jive number and Julio Inglesias' number with Cheryl and Max dancing. The rest was broadcast live. At the Wednesday show there's time to kill between the pretaping of the dance segments and the live show, so they had a dance contest where the audience could participate. (The prize was a t-shirt.) My friend won the week he went. However, for the main Tuesday show, they didn't have a contest. (Though we were prepared with shoes in hand - ha ha). So, in a nutshell, that's how it all came about.

FYI, the floor is much smaller than it appears on TV. A very cool illusion.

Ashly DelGrosso is now known as Ashly Costa. More info here.

Judge Carrie Ann Inaba is dating a guy from You Think You Can Dance. Mario is officially not dating Karina. More news in this video.

Sara Evans quit participating in Dancing With The Stars for personal reasons.


Sara's interview on Dancing With The Stars

More info:

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This week the couples who had the most entertaining routines were bashed by the judges for breaking the rules. Here is Len Goodman's explanation: