Sunday, January 10, 2010

Dancing on Ice - kinda

I will own it upfront.  The Budman and I are suckers for the UK show, Dancing on Ice, where celebs ice-dance with professional iceskaters in a weekly countdown to an overall winner at the end of 16 weeks.  Think:  Dancing with the Stars (US) or Strictly Come Dancing (UK) on an ice-rink.  Of course, the main draw of the show is Torville and Dean, of 1984 Olympic UK fame!

We've been watching it since living in Germany....no comments, please, especially from those of you who watch Celebrity Big Brother (which also films on the same site as DOI).

With that said, I signed up weeks ago for the possibility of free tickets to a taping of a live show, with the off-chance that I might actually pick up some freebie tix.  As luck had it, I procured 4 tickets to last Friday night's taping, so off in the snow and bitter cold the Budman, Cyn, Paulster, and I traipsed to the ITV studio in far north London.

We all arrived early to ensure we got seats...not everyone that shows up will get into the studio, don't you know?.  Literally at 4:30 pm, the Budman and I arrive to stand in line (outside in sub freezing temps) to obtain said seats.  We are thrilled, we are FIRST in line.. "Wow", we say, "Getting here early really paid off".  After an hour or so in line, we were allowed to come inside to wait for the 9 PM taping.  As we approached the desk and flash our tickets, we were told, "You are in the wrong line - this is only for the VIPs" (i.e. for  people who know someone that is in the show).  Thanks, Mr. Security Guard for sending us to the wrong line...we are clearly not VIPs (although, everyone is a VIP to someone, somewhere). 

As we made our way around the corner and down the street to find the line for the "regular" people, we saw the line snaking through the snow.  To make a long story short, were were 194-198 in line.  Here we are waiting in the "holding tank" (which looked like a Texas junior high school basketball gym) waiting to enter the studio.  A lovely woman offered to take our photo....here is her best attempt out of three, thumbprint and all.

Dancing on Ice 2

Kindly, her husband offered to take the photo of the four of us one final time. I think the Iphone technology threw them a bit.  OK, one more time with feeling.  Yes, sweet success!

Dancing on Ice 3

The good news is that we would have seats to watch the show.  The less than good news is that we then waited for another 2 hours or so to be shown to literally the worst seats in the studio....planted right next to the onstage ice igloo.   Sorry, let me correct that, the two women behind us on the last row technically had the worst seats in the house.  Oh well, we had a blast and laughed alot so it was a fun night.



We did race home that evening and scrolled through the taping to see if we had made of the show...no sightings of ourselves in the broadcast!

Still , we had a great time, and saw the behind the scenes filming of the show.  Sadly, it was the first show of the season so no celebs actually performed that night, but we did get to see a couple of ice dances.

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