Dear British telly,
We have Oti Mabuse. And we shan’t return her unless you pay up. I vow this now or my name isn’t Kevin Bakhurst.
I mean, my name isn’t Kevin Bakhurst. My name is not important.
(Note to my assistant: when you’re putting my dictated message into the ransom note, please remove my name. Also, use those cut-up magazine letters, like in a ransom note on the telly. Note to self: could we turn the making of ransom notes into a TV show, possibly hosted by Mary FitzGerald from How Do You Do?)
Where was I? Oh yeah. We have the Strictly Come Dancing dancer and Dancing on Ice judge Oti Mabuse. Ha ha! (Make sure you use particularly evil fonts for the “ha ha!” bits.) Ha ha ha! (Bigger and more striking fonts again here, please.)
In your face, British telly. You think you’re so great with your vastly superior budgets. Well, who’s laughing now? Me, that’s who, sitting here in the RTÉ shed, dictating this on to an old-fashioned wax cylinder while wearing fingerless gloves and darning the arse of my trousers.
Yes, you’ve probably been wondering where Oti Mabuse is. Well, she’s with us and we won’t send her back until you give us €50. Actually, hold on a minute. (How much is our news budget? Seriously?!) Make it €60 and some vouchers, please.
Also, while I’m on to you, how do you stop Oti Mabuse from dancing? She keeps dancing. She shimmies and sashays and boogies and grooves. In fact, she grooved right into the big butterfly net we used to catch her. It was almost like she wanted to be caught and British terrestrial telly has no money either. And she kept knocking my balaclava off with her syncopated hand movements. “Stop dancing, Oti Mabuse!” we cried, but it was in vain. Oti Mabuse really loves dancing.
In fact we found the only way we could contain her was to put her on a panel alongside other dancing judges. She was quite at home there. We put her sitting behind a desk with a literal Karen, albeit one from Dublin, a muppety guy with wavy arms who speaks REALLY LOUDLY and then really softly and then REALLY LOUDLY again, and a smooth grouch who’s surrounded by people who boo him. I think this is a fetish he has.
We keep her distracted by making different celebrities dance for her. Of course, I mean “celebrities” and I mean “dance”. Most of them are celebrities only in the loosest sense (in the sense that all of us are celebrities in the eyes of Jesus) and none of them has hip joints or knees or knows any music that isn’t a long, keening moan. This is Ireland, after all. Personally, I have the mobility of a Star Wars figure or a member of Westlife.
On the plus side, the dancing keeps us all warm, so we don’t have to put the heating on any more. Indeed, we’re simultaneously broadcasting all these shenanigans out to the people as Dancing to Keep Warm with funding from Bord na Móna (€20).
Of course, getting a huge bunch of celebrities and dancers into a warehouse to contain the Oti Mabuse situation brings its own problems.
Jennifer Zamparelli turned up alongside her child, Laura Fox, attracted, as usual, by the bright lights. I’m warning you now: do not leave your window open and lights on if you don’t want Zamparelli and Fox flittering about.
The duo descend two big flights of stairs that look expensive but really only exist because when they finally cut the electricity here at Montrose, we could no longer use the lifts. They’re both very glamorous, but, truth be told, I knitted their dresses out of leftover Christmas tinsel.
The line-up includes all the types of celebrity. There’s Niamh Kavanagh, a celebrity who was once on the Eurovision, all dressed up in the colours of a Neapolitan ice cream. Eurovision is a competition we used to enter when we could still afford long-distance calls. (Is Europe still a thing, by the way?)
There’s also Michael Fry, a very funny comedian from the internet. I’ve never seen the internet, but if the descriptions are anything to go by it’s basically a really small television powered by clouds. This sounds like witchcraft to me, so I’ll stick with my can on a string (RTÉ Player).
Paudie from The Traitors Ireland is here. Paudie has magic powers. He can wink his way across a room. He cannot, however, dance. The professional dancer who dances with Paudie is, essentially, doing the obstacle course people do to get into the SAS.
The other dancers are doing this, too, in fairness, although the entrepreneur and former Apprentice star Jordan Dargan seems to actually be quite good at dancing. I hope his business isn’t suffering while he’s away.
After each dance the judges give their verdict to the dancers and to Zamparelli – who will, no doubt, punish them later. The muppety man gets loud and soft and loud again. Karen looks surprised. Being surprised is her thing. Brian usually says something critical and then people boo, as is their wont, and he looks thrilled and purrs gently.
Then Oti Mabuse says something technical and poetic that makes us all actually understand dancing a bit better, and the other judges look at her like they’re fit to murder her because that really isn’t the point of Dancing to Keep Warm.
One way or another, she’s having a ball. You’d barely know this was a kidnapping.
Fox takes the dancers up to the elevated pen where the celebrities are kept overnight. There they speak for a moment about their hopes and dreams before Fox says something about a competition. Everyone mimes making a telephone call to the television cameras, even though our phones were actually cut off last week and now I tie any messages I need sent to the collar of a stray dog I know. In fairness, they’re probably just asking viewers to call the police.
Anyway, I hope this stray-dog-delivered ransom note finds you well. To be honest, writing it got away from me a little (much like the dog!). Frankly, it’s nice to talk to someone who understands what it’s like to be in the ole television business – the idiot box, the cathode ray tube, John Logie Baird’s electric sex cube. It’s so lonely here since we ate the last board member.
But enough about me. How’re you? Are the Tories still giving the BBC a hard time? In fact, are the Tories still in power? As you can see, we really do need that €60 for the news department, so if you get it over to us we’ll stick Oti Mabuse on the road and she will no doubt dance her way home.
Yours sincerely,
Kevin Bakhurst – I mean, Anonymous