Upcoming Torvill & Dean biopic on Christmas Day on ITV

overedge

Mayor of Carrot City
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I've watched about 2/3 of it so far. I really like how it shows that T&D came from ordinary families, i.e. putting the lie to the idea that elite skaters are rich and don't have to worry about anything other than skating. But like others I think that some of the melodrama is overplayed. Also, from T&D's books and from photos of them back in the day, the Nottingham ice rink was a lot more, um, basic than it's portrayed. A man driving a tractor with a wet cloth dragging behind it is not going to make ice that looks like that :lol:

One thing that really bothers me about it, though, is that the skating styles that are shown are not the ice dance styles of the late 70s/early 80s. That's important to the story, because part of what made T&D so great is that they pushed the rules and tried to resist that very rigid, upright upper bodies, constrained type of ice dancing. Any ice dancers doing the moves in the earlier part of the movie would have broken about a bazillion rules and not gotten anywhere. Instead of making melodrama about the personal relationships, the writer/filmmaker could have made a lot of genuine drama about the tension between what T&D wanted to do and what the rules permitted at the time. They also could have made more of Torvill's success in pairs prior to doing ice dance.

Also, while ice skating tests are certainly not interesting TV fodder, both T&D almost had their skating careers ended by failing tests - Torvill when she couldn't go back to singles after doing pairs, Dean when he almost failed the senior ice dance test. That should have been part of the storyline too IMO.

And while this movie isn't a documentary, any idea why Torvill's first partner was called "Andrew" rather than his real name, Michael?
 

gkelly

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OK, I have watched it.

My sense was that this was a highly fictionalized account only loosely based on the biographical facts. With changes made for better plot flow and to keep things simple for lowest common denominator audiences.

I thought I heard them name check Sandra Elson as an unshown former partner and that the earlier partner of Dean's that we did see in the show as a fictional character called Liane. Most likely so they could take whatever liberties they wanted with the character for purposes of humor and advancing the plot without making any assertions about real people who were not a key part of the story and may not have given their consent to such a portrayal.

The same would be true for Torvill's partner.
 

Rossig

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Did Dean’s mother attend the Olympics? I thought his autobiography said that she left when he was 5, and he never saw her again.

She left when he was 6. I don't think she attended Olympics, but she attended some of the their competitions. She also used to come to watch Dancing on Ice. It seems she and Chris reconnected at certain point. He tweeted that in 2017 - https://twitter.com/torvillanddean/status/925725266252406784
 

pixie cut

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She left when he was 6. I don't think she attended Olympics, but she attended some of the their competitions. She also used to come to watch Dancing on Ice. It seems she and Chris reconnected at certain point. He tweeted that in 2017 - https://twitter.com/torvillanddean/status/925725266252406784

In that big sit-down that Jayne and Christopher did with Piers Morgan about four or five years ago, he said he had reconnected with his biological mother and they had a nice relationship. They also didn't talk about what had happened in his childhood.
 

aliceanne

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Is the word "voidy" anywhere in the teleplay?

Nah, this was a cheesey coming of age movie. Lots of bad dialog and unintended comedy. The line where Jayne wanted to look the way she feels is the closest they came to being voidy. It was rather comical because she was rhapsodizing to an uninterested receptionist, who was just asking what kind of dance class she wanted to sign up for.
 

Foolhardy Ham Lint

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Nah, this was a cheesey coming of age movie. Lots of bad dialog and unintended comedy. The line where Jayne wanted to look the way she feels is the closest they came to being voidy. It was rather comical because she was rhapsodizing to an uninterested receptionist, who was just asking what kind of dance class she wanted to sign up for.

Great description.

It almost makes T & D fresh meat in a zombie movie. The people of Nottingham are chanting 'One of us. One of us.' while Jayne & Christ pursue their dreams and run for the hills of Oberstdorf.
 

Bunny Hop

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T/D in their book also claimed Janet Sawbridge dropped them abruptly at her new boyfriend/fiancé’s command (he came to the rink and told them, not her). The movie makes it sound like they decided to leave her. It seemed like a missed opportunity for drama given they were trying so hard to portray Dean as a man tormented by abandonment issues.
You must have a different book to me. I read that they took the decision to stop training with Janet Sawbridge after she got married and started to not turn up to coach them, and generally had less and less time for them. After Janet had a baby it was clear the coaching relationship was no longer going to work and it was then they moved on. It read to me that it was either Torvill & Dean's decision, or by mutual agreement.
 

Foolhardy Ham Lint

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You must have a different book to me. I read that they took the decision to stop training with Janet Sawbridge after she got married and started to not turn up to coach them, and generally had less and less time for them. After Janet had a baby it was clear the coaching relationship was no longer going to work and it was then they moved on. It read to me that it was either Torvill & Dean's decision, or by mutual agreement.

I must read John Hennesey's book again.
 

aliceanne

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You must have a different book to me. I read that they took the decision to stop training with Janet Sawbridge after she got married and started to not turn up to coach them, and generally had less and less time for them. After Janet had a baby it was clear the coaching relationship was no longer going to work and it was then they moved on. It read to me that it was either Torvill & Dean's decision, or by mutual agreement.

Yes, in the book I have they said that Sawbridge got involved with some guy and started spending less and less time with them, then one day her boyfriend showed up at the rink and told them she wouldn't be back. They claimed they weren't even invited to the wedding. The relationship with his mother was dismissed, and the relationship with his stepmother was portrayed very differently than in this movie. I think I have 2 books by them, I'll have to check when I get home to see which one I am thinking of.

It's possible that their perception of events has changed over the years or that they got some blowback from the people they wrote about. I notice this movie uses a lot of fictional characters.
 

Bunny Hop

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I have the other book as well, but I think I only read it once, whereas I read the Hennessy book multiple times as a teenager.
 

MIsty Blades/Skate Mom

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I saw this on YouTube. Wow. If all those events were true, or even close, it almost reveals why Christopher Dean has been divorced twice. I also read the movie to indicate that Torvill & Dean could have been romantically involved, but they had the intuition to realize that it would have ruined their skating partnership.
 

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