As the unthinkable happens and Gabby Logan joins Willie Thorne on the plane home, this is no moment to be fighting shy of the controversial opinion. Let’s cut straight to it, then. The decision about who gets dumped out of Strictly Come Dancing is way too important to be left to the public.

Logan gone before October is through? And Kenny, her husband, still in? What odds could you have got on that dizzyingly unreasonable outcome before the first steps were danced? So much for democracy and one man, one phone vote.

We’ve heard the judges describe the former Scotland rugby player as “going at it like Conan the Barbarian” and having “the hands of a gorilla”. This week, after a samba that seemed to have been modelled at least in part on the famous Laurel and Hardy piano-shifting routine, Bruno Tonioli told Kenny: “You have the grace of a vacuum cleaner.” Even in the era of freely moving and colourful machines made by Dyson, this remark felt unequivocally dismissive.

Kenny’s wife, on the other hand, had impressed at every turn. It wasn’t just her willingness to go the extra mile in training and her ability to carry off the punishingly small costumes – you would expect nothing less from a Times Sport columnist. It was also that she brought to the floor an innate talent for movement, enabling her to yield a string of performances that had “final-night material” written all over them in sequins.

As it is, we’re left bewilderedly pondering a sporting injustice to rank right up there with the one where Chris Eubank was dispatched from season one of Celebrity Big Brother within five minutes of unpacking his silk socks, despite being, pound for pound, the most entertaining person in the house.

What a catastrophic mess. Having positioned themselves comfortably high on the leaderboard after the judges’ voting, Logan and Penny Lancaster Stewart were condemned by a lack of public enthusiasm to the weekly white-knuckle dance-off.

“What a strange situation this is,” Bruce Forsyth said. And these days, if Bruce notices it, something must be up. Handed the casting vote, Len Goodman couldn’t have looked less comfortable if someone had left an ice-cream melting in his trousers. “This is not my role,” he protested.

“I’m here to vote off the worst dancer. I’m not here to vote off one of the best.” Oh yes, he was. Penny stayed, Gabby left.

Leaving who? Dominic Littlewood, the season’s token nut-box, and GMTV’s Kate Garraway, who is to dancing what Nigel Mansell was to bell-ringing. The secret of Garraway’s amazing survival? She’s with Anton du Beke. I know people (OK, one person) who vote Kate in order to vote Anton. This is a hazard, five seasons in, when some of the professional dancers have grown to be bigger celebrities than the celebrities and have been in a more recently successful television show than they have. Chew on that, postmodernism fans.

So whither now sport’s 2007 assault on the pro-celebrity ballroom summit? Thorne was ousted a week ago, amid national disappointment, claiming that his day job - commentating on the snooker – had badly impaired his training. One word, Thorne: priorities.

Goodman spoke for columnists and media analysts everywhere when he ruefully said: “I never got to do any of my Willie jokes.” But, let’s face it, the legendary snooker man’s exit was to nobody’s great surprise. For his parting tango he seemed to have been wired by terrorists to a device that would explode if he moved any part of himself situated above knee height. Nevertheless, heroically, and in the face of extreme intimidation, his moustache remained solid. It always did. It never once moved from his face, even during the more vigorous dances. We’ll miss that moustache.

It leaves us with the male half of the Logan partnership (Logan the Barbarian) and John Barnes, who looked so promising early doors, but who was forced into the dance-off against Thorne and probably should have appeared in it at the weekend, too, after a ninth-placed American Smooth that had a decidedly lumpy appearance.

On the subject of lumpy appearances, Barnes does seem to have risen earnestly to Arlene Phillips’s challenge to “get fit”. Size looked likely to be an issue for the Liverpool legend, especially in week three when he came out to do the jive and bits of his upper body appeared still to be vibrating from the previous Saturday’s meringue. Peter Beardsley, his fellow former England player and a guest in the studio a week ago, got it exactly wrong when he said: “There’s only one John Barnes, to be fair.” To be fair, there are at present about two and a half of the John Barneses that most of us remember.

However, weight appears to be dropping off the ex-footballer even as we watch. Phillips insists that she still has “faith” in him and for as long as she does, so do we. Altogether, then: “Two and a half John Barneses/ There’s only two and a half John Barneses . . .”