Strictly's Craig admits scoring blunder

Strictly's Craig admits scoring blunder
Strictly's Craig admits scoring blunder (Image credit: Doug Peters/EMPICS Entertainment)

Craig Revel Horwood has confessed he accidentally held up the wrong score while judging Strictly Come Dancing - then had to find fault with the contestant to avoid admitting his blunder. The notoriously hard-to-please panellist says he aimed to give a seven - a generous score for him - but ended up giving a four to one poor dancer. Craig admitted the gaffe during an edition of BBC2's Sarah Millican Television Programme to be screened tomorrow. "Of course, because it was a low score I then had to find as many things wrong with it as I could," he said. The choreographer - whose tenth recent series of Strictly finished last month - did not name the hapless contestant. "I remember it was a four but I wanted to give a seven, you see, so it was a bit of a disaster." He added: "It's live television - what can you do, darling?" Sarah also dresses as a naughty nurse as she teams up with guests from BBC1 series Casualty for a comedy sketch. She is joined by Tony Marshall, Suzanne Packer, Charles Dale and Azuka Oforka from the show as she uses a defibrillator on a patient who is wheeled on to the show. Sarah nipped off to get changed into a PVC outfit for the scene after stepping behind a curtain. She tells them: "I've got my own uniform - it's wipe-clean." Suzanne - who plays Casualty's Tess Bateman - told how viewers asked her for medical advice in real life. "It normally happens to me on a Saturday morning when I have popped out to the DVD store in my pyjamas and someone asks me about their bleeding piles," she said. The Sarah Millican Television Programme is screened on BBC2 on Tuesday at 10pm.

Patrick McLennan

Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix. 

An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.