Murder on the dance floor

Each week we rank Strictly contestants based on social media analysis. We call this the Strictly Sentiment score.

Week four and it was murder on the dance floor as our Strictly Sentiment model only got one of the bottom two right.

As always, we analysed 1,000s of tweets collected during and just after the show to derive a Strictly Sentiment score. We then added this to the judges scores to make a prediction.

Our prediction was that Max would dance off with either JJ or Caroline.

Whoops! 

We got Max right but not that Maisie would join him in the dance off. So what went wrong?

I'm tempted to say that nothing really went wrong, it's just that different methods produce different results. But I would say that wouldn't I?

In fact we got a lot right. Our Strictly Sentiment method picked up on Maisie's sharp drop in sentiment and Jamie's vastly improved rating with the public. 

The fact of the matter is that we didn't pick up on the strength of JJ's public support. We recorded the positive sentiment around his back story in the armed forces. We also picked up on the boost that Prince Harry's video call gave him. But this alone wasn't enough to drive up his score to the level that would have made him safe. 

JJ seems to be everyone's second or third favourite contestant. This is important because the public is allowed up to three votes in the BBC's poll and JJ picks up a lot of votes from people who favour other dancers. 

Strictly Sentiment leaderboard

This week, Maisie suffered more than previous weeks from the view that as she is a trained dancer, she should be good. A lot of tweets expressed the view that her dance was under cooked this week given her training. Tweeters also pointed out that she won Strictly Children in Need in 2019 and memories of this might have been jogged by CIN 2020 being on the previous evening.

There is no doubt that expectations are higher for Maisie and she will have to do more to win back positive public sentiment.

The other big story was Max swearing after his routine. Max got a record number of tweets during the show but the majority of these commented on the F bomb rather than his dancing. We correctly predicted that he would be in the dance off.

We've always said that our Strictly Sentiment model is just a bit of fun. However, it's more fun when we get it spot on like we have in every other week! Strange that.

We tweet our prediction one hour before the results show. We have our fingers crossed for next week.

Strictly Sentiment score

The Strictly Sentiment score is derived from a sentiment analysis of tweets. Using natural language programming and machine learning we classify each tweet as positive, neutral or negative. Tweets are filtered so that they only relate to a celebrity's appearance on the show rather than what they do in their 'day job'. Only tweets made between 7pm and midnight are included. This is to ensure that tweets relate to Strictly.

We then add up all the positive tweets for each contestant and assign a score between 1 and 100.  This score is based on the relative distribution of positive tweets. We do this to make it easier to compare and contrast Strictly Sentiment scores.