The issues surrounding the eviction from Strictly Come Dancing of Mark Foster inevitably rumbled on into Strictly Come Dancing - It Takes Two, the nightly debrief on BBC2 in which the events that boil up so rapidly in the white heat of the live contest can receive the concerted reflection and sober analysis that they merit and demand.

The shock, the anger, the lingering sense of injustice - none of these, obviously, applied in the case of Foster's exit which, in all honesty, had been coming to him since about week one, when the former world champion over 50 metres revealed himself to be a fish out of water in the ballroom - a bit like at the Beijing Olympics, where he was a fish out of water in the swimming pool, too.

Not that the voters seemed to mind, for as long as Foster's dancing tops remained filmy and see-through, and, understandably, the pressing matter occupying Claudia Winkelman as she welcomed a clearly deflated Foster into the walk-in glitter ball that constitutes the It Takes Two studio was whether ballroom would see the like of his chest again.

To which the answer is, almost certainly, no. Revealed in full one last time, straight after his eviction, Foster's well-honed torso seemed to exist at the point where Barbie's old friend, Ken, meets the architectural model for a new airport terminal building. It was noticeable that the week in which he went for a thicker, slightly less revealing top, was also the week in which Foster lost the public's confidence and the sympathy of the judges.

We don't fault him for playing the pectoral card throughout Strictly. At the same time, other swimmers routinely use full-body, “sharkskin”-style suits to reduce friction and, if the technology is there, it seems a shame not to use it. It could have spared Foster from being described by Craig Revel Horwood, on the judging panel, as “a stick insect on acid” - a fate you would wish on no swimmer on his first foray into the celebrity challenge arena - and might have trimmed whole seconds off his time.

Arlene Phillips, though by no means blind to the extent of Foster's technical problems from the chest down, was at least encouraging, suggesting that he deploy whatever breathing technique he used when swimming to the service of his dancing. Constructive advice, there, from the former Hot Gossip choreographer, and no doubt it would have been of immense value to Foster, had he survived to dance another week, and had he not revealed to Winkelman on Monday that, in fact, he doesn't do any breathing when he swims. (It's one big breath at the start, 34 strokes and out.)

In truth, though, this “gentle giant” was mostly hindered by an inability to kindle the naked aggression needed for a serious attempt on ballroom's biggest prize. The naked bit, Foster had no trouble with. It was the aggression that did for him. Getting the swimmer fired up for the tango proved about as difficult as lighting a bonfire during a monsoon. Foster carried the Great Britain flag at the opening ceremony for the Games and anyone who witnessed the self-belief he took to that crucial duty would barely have recognised the shy and painfully uncertain figure who turned up in slightly flared trousers for the paso doble.

Still, the upshot is that Austin Healey is in a very strong position indeed. It won't have escaped the notice of the “Leicester Lip” that he has survived what seasoned observers of Strictly refer to as “the traditional week-six lull” - that moment of deflation that occurs when the nervous energy accrued in the first five weeks of the series peaks and cuts out and that notoriously makes round six of the show such crap viewing. The payback, though, is normally a surge of renewed electricity in round seven, and if Healey can plug into that on Saturday night, the former England rugby union international could light the place up and set down his most important dance floor scorch-mark yet.

Nevertheless, our feeling remains that there is plenty more to come from Andrew Castle. The former British tennis No 1 is reversing a history of failure at this level for people who present GMTV in their spare time, and last week's Viennese Waltz was among the competition's most improved performances, even if it did dump him in the dance-off with Foster.

Encouragingly, Castle is also, according to Len Goodman, the chair of the judges, officially out of the other side of “Bumgate”, Goodman's useful term for the scandal that threatened to arise from the tennis man's frequently sketchy control of his nether regions - a problem that threatened to wreck Castle's ballroom campaign before it even got off the ground, much as it derailed John Barnes's last year. With his bum now in harness, who knows what Castle can achieve?