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Exercise - Analyse BBC Strictly Results

The objective of this exercise is to analyse the data from the first week of the BBC Strictly competition. The data is in the “Week 1” table on this Wikipedia web page

Strictly is a Saturday evening light entertainment BBC show. It is a dancing competition. The series was in autumn 2023. Originally about 15 couples compete for the glitterball trophy. A couple is made of a celebrity and a professional dancer. There are also four judges; in this series these were Craig, Motsi, Shirley and Anton.

Each week, couples perform a dance, and the four judges give a score out of ten. The audience can also vote although details of the audience results are not released. When all couples have danced, the audience and judge scores are combined and the two couples with the least combined votes go into the dance off. The judges then vote to save one of the couples and the other couple is eliminated. There are a few exceptions; no couples are eliminated in the first week and in this series two couples withdrew from the competition and so there were no eliminations into two of the later weeks.

The data is provided by Wikipedia. The original results data for the latest series are here. Wikipedia provides separate tables for each week but for this exercise, the results data for all weeks has been appended into one single dataset. The results data has the following columns:

• Couple e.g. in the format Celebrity and Professional Dancer e.g. Nigel and Katya
• Dance, e.g. Waltz, Foxtrot
• Scores – these are provided in a single column in the format : Total Score (Craig, Motsi, Shirley, Anton) e.g. 30 (6,7,8,9)
• Music (artist and song)

Here are some suggested prompts to start your analysis.

• Act as a data analyst. Analyse the data in the Week 1 table of this web page

• What was the total score given by each judge?
• Who is the meanest judge?
• Combine with the data in the Week 2 and Week 3 tables and describe the combined dataset.
• The tables from Week 2 onwards also show the result e.g, whether the couple was safe, in the bottom two or eliminated. (In week 1 there was no elimination.) Is it always the couple with the lowest score that is eliminated? (note: in my practice run, the AI tool made mistakes so please check its answers carefully)

Optional Advanced Exercise 2

Analyse the full results from the Autumn 2023 series from an Excel dataset containing several Excel tables. Download from here.