KEY POINTS:
Dancing with the Stars does truth in advertising. It has the promised sparkles, smiles, music and grateful charities. Down at the end of the show it also delivers a moment only a Mafioso or a mass audience could love. One of the two lower scorers will go. The camera goes in tight on every twitch as one pair discover they are out.
This helps to obey the show business law that no two overly similar characters can remain, with the first Dancing shows keeping more or less to that.
This year had six of the eight "names" in three clear categories.
Martin Devlin and Peter Urlich had the Sensitive Early Middle Aged Guy slot. Geeling Ng and Miriama Smith were the Female Ethnic-Looking Actors. Cory Hutchings and Monty Betham are this year's Powerfully Built Good Looking Athletes.
Sadly, the producers decided against or could not find a volunteer for the Gallant Geezer category, occupied in the past by Tim Shadbolt, Paul Holmes, Christine Rankin and Rodney Hide.
Tina Cross, a singer, and Temepara George, a netballer, rounded out the line-up. They were left without direct competition, a potentially useful point of difference.
Cross had something else running for her: her age. Given this is the show's fourth season, she could have expected past voting patterns to snap in and give her a helping nudge.
It looks from the outside as if the voters skew female and are in a demographic prioritising family over club and pub. In year one they went for Norm Hewitt's powerfully masculine presence. Then it was two women, both inching up to being a certain age, in Lorraine Downes and Suzanne Paul, both thoroughly deserved. They might have also had a push from a "people like us still count for a lot" mood.
This year they axed Geeling Ng first. Then, possibly because many of those female voters have a Sensitive Early Middle Aged Man on the couch beside them, there was little appeal for another one on the box. Devlin and Urlich went down the Boulevard of No Return.
On Tuesday night Cross turned out to have less running for her than it looked. In the contest between the voters' alliances and the Laws of Show Business, the latter appeared to have won. Cross went.
Only in a nation used to managing the sophisticated MMP system would voters have managed to combine show business and their own wishes.
Miriama Smith's samba surely attracted male voters and her television profile makes her popular with the young. From there the hand of the voters who saw Downes and Paul home was seen.
Temepara George is a famously independent-minded soul who will not be dictated too, as witness her stance on last year's netball tests. Not all women regard this as a bad thing. She joins Smith and the staunchly manned-up Betham and Hutchings as the final four, a nice compromise between show business and the voters' will.
While no one should encourage gambling, as this leads to penury and sin, this writer's bet is George and Hutchings for the final, with George to win.
* Dancing with the Stars, One, Tuesday, 8.30pm.
