The Gigolos (Again)

No Fred Olsen Cruise is complete without spending some quality time watching the Gigolos, or Dance Hosts as Fred insists on calling them, so we turned up early for the show to see them perform. The theatre has a dance floor that can be raised to create the stage. Doing this when the room is full of old people is a health and safety nightmare and provides ideal material for a YouTube video. Incidentally, the show that night was excellent with a singing tap dancing comedian who played the clarinet, the flute and the saxophone. If he could only add “master of disguise” to his many skills he could clean up on cruise ships as the sole entertainer (or maybe he already does)

Anyway, it's on this dance floor that the Gigolos strut their stuff. I thought I'd already blogged everything there is to say about this subject but, after we'd identified all four and worked out that they'd only got 3 good knees between them, I felt another blog coming on. As I'm sure that I've said before, I'd love to see the pre-employment questionnaire that these chaps fill in. It probably asks if they can dance so that applicants with previous experience can be ruthlessly excluded. There must also be medical questions like “are you bed ridden” and I expect they have to attach a doctors note saying that the odds are that they'll still have a pulse by the date they're due to sail.

This time the four are definitely two pairs of two. The first pair are old, unattractive and can't dance very well. The second pair have been employed for the sole purpose of making the first pair look sexy and so, as you might expect, I'll concentrate on them. In keeping with tradition we've given them the nicknames of Bionic Man and Douglas. The Bionic man appears to have had a, not particularly successful, limb transplant. His arms and legs don't seem to quite belong to him and I'm fairly certain someone is working him with a joystick from the lighting gallery. He wears his trousers high with his belt at nipple level, presumably to conceal the servo motors. As he lurches round the floor waving his arms there's a constant danger that he will literally sweep a lady off her feet.

Douglas is the spitting image of Douglas Herd's spitting image. He's tall with a stoop and hangs over his partners like a preying mantis. As most of his partners are small elderly ladies, their heads end up firmly clamped to his navel and you're quite surprised when he doesn't eat them at the end of each waltz. Most of the time he wears an “I wish I was somewhere else expression” with occasional grimaces of pain when he carries out a tricky dance move like changing direction. When he left the dance floor before the show he had to tackle the sloping floor of the theatre in three stage with rests in between.

I mustn't be too cruel. As a typical male of my generation, who thinks dancing is just a missable part of foreplay, I don't have a right to criticise anyone’s moves. (Unless of course they're on Strictly Come Dancing.) I do wish Douglas and the Bionic Man well and hope they will be leaving the ship with us at Southampton. After Southampton, Balmoral is off on a World Cruise and quite frankly there's no way both of them will make it all the way round.

Dave