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