What's going on with Maisie?

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

We need to talk about Maisie.

For the last two weeks Maisie has been in the dance off. On Saturday's show she was ranked second after the judges scores but still found herself in the bottom two once the public had their say. When someone does a good dance it usually leads to a high sentiment score. Not for Maisie. What's going on?

It's clear that the public have not warmed to her and there is speculation on Twitter about why this is. Some people say that she is unfairly judged by the public because she has been to stage school and had dance training. She won last year's Strictly Children in Need and this is said to count against her. Others think that it's because the Strictly voting public do not like confident young women and are therefore not voting for her. 

A different school of thought says that because her dancing is so good, people think that she does not need their vote. The last two weeks have shown this is not true.

Of course, Maisie cannot be viewed in isolation from the other contestants and we think that there are several things going on that indirectly lead to Maisie's votes (and Strictly sentiment score) being lower than those for other contestants.

JJ's support is interesting. We think he gets a lot of what we call silent votes. These are people who are not on Twitter or, if they are, do not tweet about him but vote for him. Getting a lot of votes from those not on Twitter and who are possibly not even online, has boosted his public score. The BBC does not publish the results of the public vote but we suspect that JJ picks up quite a few telephone votes as well.

Also at play is the way the Strictly audience takes someone to their heart and puts a collective arm around them. We see this with Clara whose supporters seem fiercely protective of her and encourage others to vote for her. This would explain how she managed to escape the dance off this week.

Taken together we think that Maisie suffers from sections of the public not warming to her (for whatever reason), not having a collective arm put around her and not having a bank of silent supporters. 



Strictly Sentiment leaderboard

That's all speculation. This is fact. Both Caroline and Maisie were in the bottom two on sentiment although when we added in judges scores Maisie pulled away. Our prediction was that Caroline would dance off with either Clara or JJ. In fairness, we did say that Maisie could easily be pulled into the dance off, which was the case.

The model showed Jamie going up the Sentiment leaderboard into second place after his highly rated dance. Bill still leads the way but his Sentiment score has fallen. Shape of things to come?





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.