About

This website is a nerd's paradise, providing information about the TV show Strictly Come Dancing in the UK.

Why does it exist?

This project is the most expensive possible way of asking a simple question: Has anyone been in a dance off and gone on to win the show? What's the answer to that? I don't know yet!

Why does it look so ugly?

I am not a designer! If you'd like to help me improve the look of this site, please contact me.

Colophon

• This website is built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Drizzle ORM. It is hosted on Vercel.
• The AI Chatbot is built using LangChain and uses OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini model as the LLM.
• The database is hosted on Neon serverless Postgres.
• Data entry was done mostly via NocodeDB.
• The data primarily comes from Wikipedia, with some additional data from the BBC website.

Oddities

In modelling the data for this website, I found a few oddities worth noting:

• Two people have transitioned roles across the seasons. Anton Du Beke transitioned from a professional to being a judge. And Alesha Dixon transitioned from a celebrity to being a judge. I had to account for this in the data model to allow for a person's role to be attached to a season, rather than being a properly of each person-record. I really hope in future a single person does not have multiple roles in a single season. That would give me a lot of work to do.
• Season 18 in 2020 was unusual in that it only had three judges because of the pandemic. As a result, Season 18's dances were scored out of 30, not 40. That means you cannot compare the total scores for dances across seasons. As such, this site mostly looks at the average score out of 10 as metric to compare dances and competitors across seasons.
• Similarly, in Season 12, Donny Osmond was a guest judge for Week 3. This was the only time a guest judge sat alongside all the regular judges. For those two weeks, all dances were scored out of 50, not 40 as per usual. Another reason to use the average score out of 10 as the universal metric rather than the total score recieved for each dance.
• Anton has been partnered with TWO people called Lesley: Lesley Garrett (Season 1) and Lesley Joseph (Season 14) which broke a few things when importing the data.
• In Season 6, John Sergeant withdrew from the competition in Week 10 but they were still allowed to perform their dance, however they were not scored. The dance appears in the dataset and contributes to the number of dances he and his partner are considered to have performed. However, the score is modelled as a 0 and thus does bring down his and his partner's average score. I should probably have modelled the score as a null value. Perhaps I will do that in the future.