After the crippling double blow dealt to sport’s chances on Strictly Come Dancing (Martina Hingis and Richard Dunwoody have been blown away and we’re only two weeks in), and with Joe Calzaghe looking only marginally more likely to prosper in this setting than an antique sideboard, one turned for some semblance of solace to the season premiere of Dancing with the Stars, the American version of the pro-celebrity ballroom classic. (It’s showing on Watch TV, the crisply named digital channel.)

Here you tend to be able to rely on sports stars to deliver, and deliver big. True, Evander Holyfield — a quarter-finalist in the first series — holds the official record for the worst jive in the programme’s history. (A glimmer of consolation there for Calzaghe.) But five times out of eight the dancer lifting silverware at the end of the US season has come from the world of sport — most recently Shawn Johnson, the Olympic gold medal-winning balance beam gymnast, who was no stranger to flipping around on a shiny wooden surface, albeit a slightly narrower one. Contrast UK sport’s more apologetic record: two wins for cricketers. (Can Phil Tufnell make it a triple in 2009? We have everything crossed.) Surely, Stateside, sport would be holding its head high — not to mention tucking in its knees, completing its arm movements and following through properly in its all-important transitions. Maybe British sport could pick up some tips.

Little separates the shows, in some respects. The sets are almost identical. The back room where the dancers await their scores looks like the madam’s reception area in a 1920s Berlin brothel. No Bruce Forsyth, of course, which is a big miss. That said, the legendary presenter’s fairly relaxed approach to joke build-ups probably wouldn’t suit the faster pace of the American game, where, like as not, they would have cut to commercials at least twice before he reached the punchline.

But Len Goodman and Bruno Tonioli sit on the judging panel on both sides of the Atlantic — a Phil Collins at Live Aid-style achievement that is all the more impressive in a post-Concorde world. And the American version also uses the British MC’s voiceover, which again helps the UK-based viewer to bed down quickly.

Tonioli, we can report, continues to perfect his shtick of twisting out of his chair while passing comment, as if judging dancing was itself a kind of dance. He might not be wrong. Goodman, on the other hand, slightly veers away from the genial uncle role he plays in London, to become a more reactionary whip-cracker, apt to get boos from the studio audience for punishingly low marking. It’s a little dislocating to witness this transformation. But maybe it’s just the jet lag.

As for the standard of the competition ... well, one doesn’t wish to tip oneself into a steaming vat of controversy, but would it be fair to suggest that it is somewhat higher over there? I only ask after witnessing Aaron Carter, the former child pop star, deliver a week one cha-cha-cha that made it look as though he’d been dancing all his life. Which, of course, he has been, the American selectors apparently having few qualms about conscripting previously qualified competitors.

See also the presence, in this series, of Donny Osmond, who was doing the Crazy Horses knee-waggle back when Calzaghe was still a twinkle in his trainer’s eye. (Incidentally, according to his professional partner, “Donny gets really embarrassed when we have to practise intimate holds.” It was somehow incredibly reassuring to hear that.) This year’s sports-based contestants, though, do genuinely seem to be coming to the floor fresh and untested — especially Chuck Liddell, who is described as “the man who put ultimate fighting on the map”. According to our understanding, ultimate fighting is the version of hand-to-hand combat in which the use of firearms and bits of broken wood is strictly prohibited, but in which almost nothing else is.

Liddell, who seems to share none of Osmond’s reluctance about intimacy, possesses a mohawk hairstyle and may be unique in the history of this competition in bringing to the floor a tattooed head. “I’m so far out of my comfort zone,” he declared, which seemed unarguable — although, at the same time, what, for an ultimate fighter, constitutes a comfort zone? It’s blows to the face and kidneys, 24/7, surely, in that game.

Anyway, discomfort may have accounted for Liddell’s facial expression during his debut foxtrot, when he resembled someone who was about to regurgitate a cannonball. Also struggling was Michael Irvin, the series’ token football player, a three-times Super Bowl winner and NFL Hall of Famer, yet having problems “unlocking his hips” for the present challenge. Louie Vito, the snowboarder, seemed more immediately at home, possessing the necessary elasticity, though Goodman didn’t like his hairstyle.

Did one see an eventual winner here? One fears not. Whisper it, but sport’s ballroom problem appears to have gone global.