Strictly Come Dancing’s Shirley Ballas speaks out after THAT Lindy Hop mess

Shirley Ballas has spoken out after last night’s dance disaster when Strictly hosted its first ever Lindy-Hop-A-Thon.

Over the years, Strictly has seen a number of special rounds: We’ve had a Waltz-a-Thon, Quickstep-a-thon, the Cha-Cha-Cha Challenge and last year’s Paso Doble-a-thon.

This year saw another new one: Lindy-Hop-A-Thon.

The remaining celebs all took to the dancefloor at the same time, dancing the Lindy Hop with their pro partners.

And while the dancing went fine, the scoring didn’t go quite to plan.

A technical glitch saw the judges having to revert to a piece of paper to give their marks, before Shirley inadvertently announced the wrong couple as the bottom pair.

She had incorrectly named Ashley Roberts and Pasha Kovalev in seventh place, rather than awarding them seven points as the winners.

Another mistake saw Shirley mix up pro dancers Karen Clifton and Dianne Buswell as she revealed the judges’ rankings.

Tweeting after the show, Shirley said: “‘Hysterical, computers went down, well that’s live TV, amazing show this evening. @DarceyOfficial @BrunoTonioli @CraigRevHorwood great team. Thank you to all who tuned in. X.”

A spokesperson for the show said of the on-air gaffes: “Once the judges had scored the Lindy-hopathon, the marks were successfully electronically recorded on a tablet and fed to the gallery who received an accurate record of the judges marks.

“When Head Judge Shirley had to read the marks out live on air, the tablet she was reading from malfunctioned and went blank so she was unable to read out the final order.”

They added: “Bruno therefore read out the results from a back up, which is a paper template and had been filled in by the judges.”

In the end, behind Ashley and Pasha in first place were Faye Tozer and Giovanni Pernice, scoring an extra 6 points.

Joe Sugg and Dianne Buswell ranked third, receiving 5 points. Stacey Dooley and Kevin Clifton finished fourth, scoring 4 points and Charles Venn and Karen Clifton were in fifth, scoring 3 points.

Graeme Swann and Oti Mabuse finished sixth, scoring 2 points and Lauren Steadman and AJ Pritchard were seventh, picking up just the 1 point.

The extra points were added to their scores out of 40 for their main routines.

Strictly Come Dancing results airs Sunday night at 7:20PM.