Getting to grips with a rumba

WHEN celebrities take up challenges, such as living in the wild or climbing a mountain, you get the feeling sometimes that they're having far too good a time with little sense of danger or failure.

But there are times in Charlie Goes Latin when Ground Force's Charlie Dimmock looks totally out of her depth. Tottering around in three inch heels, wearing a sparkly dress, and being twirled around the dance floor to within an inch of her life doesn't come easily to the water feature specialist.

Give her a spade and a wheelbarrow, and Charlie is your darling. Here she's given four months to master five basic dances, including samba and jive, to earn a place in the South of England Latin formation team.

Teacher Lesley tells her she needs to be "hot, confident and sexy" and if she doesn't consider her good enough, she won't let her dance in the championships.

"If we have tears, we have tears," she says. And we do have tears, as Charlie fears she's letting down the team.

What she finds most difficult is being seductive on the dance floor. This is particularly necessary in the rumba, once described as "the vertical expression of horizontal desire".

Perhaps it's something to do with her allotted partner Ian's comment on being introduced. "You're not as big as I thought you were going to be," he says, before realising what he meant as a compliment sounds like an insult.

You have to admire her for tackling such a major task and getting into positions to tax a contortionist. The experts are on hand to help, although Lionel Blair doesn't build her confidence by telling her, "you're walking like a builder" and Wayne Sleep looks worried after a routine in which she ended up doing the splits. "Are you hurt?," he asks.

"No, it's just a bit of a shock," replies Charlie.

She certainly looks good in tights as she learns a routine from the musical Chicago. "Do you feel sexy?," asks Claire Sweeney, who moved from Brookside to Chicago on the London stage, after Charlie performs the routine.

"No, hot and sweaty," she replies.

Perhaps a preview of You Askin?, I'm Dancin' would have given her some tips. This history of dance crazes was one of those compilation programmes, interweaving dance clips with recollections by the usual celebrity suspects including Jenny Eclair, Toyah Willcox, Keith Duffy and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.

Appearing too was film director Michael Winner, not the first person who springs to mind when dancing is mentioned. His interest was TV's Come Dancing - because "it shows human nature at its worst".