Boosting our serotonin levels is all in a day’s work for the Strictly pros.
For nearly 20 years, Strictly Come Dancing has been lighting up Saturday and Sunday nights. A spark of joy in a gloomy world, the theme music is the cue for many of us to slip our earthly bounds and lift off to Planet Strictly.
This year is no different. The music, the dance, the camaraderie, the good-natured competition, the skills of the professional dancers, the sight of a septuagenarian former newsreader doing the splits… For more than seven million people every week, Strictly is their happy place.
But you don’t have to be a Strictly devotee to head to TV to find happiness, as the preliminary findings of our ground-breaking piece of audience research prove. At the end of May we announced we were teaming up with psychologists from the universities of Brighton and Sussex to launch the largest study of television viewers in the UK. We called it The Screen Test.
At the heart of the survey were two questions: What was the last programme you watched? And how did it make you feel?
An astonishing 21,244 of you took the time to answer those questions (and more) and we were pleased to unveil the survey results a few days ago at the BFI on London’s Southbank before an invited audience of the most important figures in British TV, including the BBC’s chief content officer Charlotte Moore; Ian Katz, the man who runs Channel 4; and the MD of Amazon Prime UK, Chris Bird.
In the latest issue of Radio Times magazine – out now – find out what we discovered and hear what our guests made of the findings. But it’s not a spoiler to reveal that Strictly was ahead of its time when it came to cracking the code of what we want from television emotionally. It’s time to switch on to Happy TV.
You can also vote now in the Radio Times Screen Test Awards 2023 to have your say on the shows that made you feel good and improved your wellbeing over the past year.
Also in this week’s Radio Times:
- Carol Vorderman on her long television career, indignant social media posts attacking the Government and the power of social media
- Clive Myrie chats about being a shy child and his mum thinking he was mute, the “too poncey” BBC of yesteryear and why due impartiality doesn’t mean being 50/50 on each side
- John le Carré’s sons Simon and Stephen Cornwell discuss the documentary they starred in about their late father, the tough moments grieving for such a public figure and dreams for a follow-up to The Night Manager
Strictly Come Dancing continues on Saturday 14th October at 6:30pm. The results show will air on Sunday 15th October 1t 7:15pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
Check out more of our Entertainment coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on.
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