Amanda Abbington was at it again at the weekend, bawling her eyes out over her Strictly PTSD experience.
Her familiar visage – scraped-back hair, eyes puffy from crying – stared out from the front page of a red-top paper on Sunday alongside the headline: ‘The BBC allowed bully Gio to get away with this.’
Inside, we were treated once again to an updated script of a psychodrama that she has written, directed and starred in for months now, a production in which she plays the eternal victim fighting the injustices of a misogynist world, the ultimate self-appointed #MeToo heroine.
If anyone thought the matter had been laid to rest with the publication last week of the BBC’s five-month inquiry into her allegations of abuse at the hands of her Strictly dance partner Giovanni Pernice, this delusion was immediately shattered by the interview she gave to BBC’s Newsnight soon after it was released.
Amanda has previously spoken about what she claims was her ordeal on last year’s Strictly
But there was a new twist. The headline over her interview read: ‘Gio ordeal was so toxic that my cancer scare came as a relief’.
Cancer scare? That’s news! In this latest instalment of the Amanda soap, she finally reveals the real reason she mysteriously quit the 2023 series of Strictly in Week Five, citing unspecified ‘medical reasons’, when she was tipped to make the final.
Apparently, she had discovered two lumps in her right breast.
How awful for her. And how right for her to put her health first and quit the show for her own sake and the sake of her two children Joe, 18 and Grace, 16.
As someone who, like millions of other women, has suffered just such a scare, I immediately felt for Amanda.
The lumps she had found thankfully proved to be benign, just as mine were.
So did the root causes of Amanda’s PTSD set in before or after the breast cancer scare? I’m as confused as the next person.
Amanda Abbington on Newsnight, where she spoke about her cancer scare
In her interview at the weekend, she said: ‘That’s what I was thinking, that it [breast cancer] was a healthier option than being in that room.’
But we now know that when she told Gio about her cancer fears he was nothing but sympathetic and understanding.
He immediately called doctors he knew who might be in a position to help her and she was touched and grateful for his kindness.
I am told there may be two sides to this story and that more will emerge, namely that her language was somewhat coarse towards Giovanni.
Not so saintly now, are we Amanda? Yet we’re still left in the dark as to when the dreaded PTSD actually set in.
‘Leading up to it, I was so excited,’ she said at the weekend. ‘Everyone else on the show was wonderful, but 80 per cent of the time it was morbid, horrible and toxic. I kept crying and shaking and feeling anxious and tingly and panicky.’
Amanda Abbington and Giovanni Pernice on last year’s Strictly series
Given her relentless campaign of vilification against Giovanni over the last year or so, it’s beginning to look as if that’s all Amanda does: cry, panic and play the victim.
Call me a cynic, but isn’t she doing rather well out of adding fuel to the fire in this way?
Let’s be frank: few of us – myself included – had ever even heard of her before the Strictly scandal blew up, despite her distinguished but rather underwhelming 30-year career on TV and stage.
Who can remember her TV roles on Inside No 9 last year, The Spaceman, The Family Pile or Das Netz – Prometheus. Nope, me neither.
I vaguely remember her in Mr Selfridge, blink-and-you-missed-her in The Bill and Casualty, and I was sadly unable to see her in her stage roles in God Of Carnage and The Unfriend.
She’s currently performing to half-empty houses in a north London theatre in When It Happens To You, a play based on the true story of a distressed mother trying to keep her family together after a traumatic event.
Is this art imitating life? I’m guessing that pretty much all Amanda has to do in the starring role is weep and rail against the injustices of the world. If so, she’s in danger of becoming typecast.
Amanda was only ever briefly memorable for her role in the TV series Sherlock, in which she played the wife of the legendary detective’s sidekick Dr Watson.
Watson, of course, was played by her then partner Martin Freeman, the now multi-millionaire Hobbit actor.
Which leads me to another of her accusations against Gio.
Abbington said her ex, Freeman, now loved up with a French actress half her age, gave her his full support during her Strictly ‘ordeal’.
This involved at least one 45-minute phone call in which he reassured her saying: ‘I’m sorry you’re having to go through this. This is awful. You don’t deserve it. I want to kill him.’
But if he felt so strongly, why has Freeman chosen not to speak out publicly in defence of Amanda?
Could it be that he fears what they call in Hollywood ‘reputational damage’?
And why did so many Strictly women support Gio behind the scenes, according to insiders.
Head judge Shirley Ballas made her unerring support for Gio both public and unequivocal and, while the show’s star presenters Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly have made no public pronouncements on the matter, they are believed to have sympathised with his plight.
Senior Strictly executives are also believed to have stood by the professional dancer.
It was only after they had given cast-iron guarantees of Giovanni’s suitability that he was given the all-clear to perform before millions of adoring fans in the Italian version of Strictly, Dancing With The Stars.
Meanwhile, we British Strictly fans have lost one of our most loved dancers. No wonder the show’s viewing figures have plummeted.
The truth is that the battle for the glitterball has been eclipsed by an increasingly embarrassing pity party presided over by Amanda playing the starring role of her life in a movie that might be called Stricken By Strictly.
