Torvill & Dean

To anyone of my generation, particularly to anyone who shares my love of figure skating, the names "Torvill and Dean" will take us back to a winter's evening in 1984 when Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, two young people from Nottingham competing in the Winter Olympics at Sarajevo, electrified the world with their ice dance routine to Maurice Ravel's "Bolero". This routine received twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9s, including artistic impression scores of 6.0 from every judge, setting an Olympic record which has never been equalled since, and never will be, now that the system of scoring has been changed. (They achieved even better scores at the World Championships in Ottawa a few weeks later, but somehow nobody seems to remember that so well). What made "Bolero" so electrifying was not just the high marks or the technical skills involved, but also its dramatic and emotional content. Torvill and Dean were, along with their East German contemporary Katarina Witt, part of what might be called the "New Skating" movement which sought to turn figure skating from a sporting discipline into an art form.

To anyone of a younger generation, Torvill and Dean are, at most, names from the sporting history books. I was therefore surprised to learn that this filmed biography of the pair was made as late as 2018, 34 years after their greatest triumph.

There is perhaps a reason why no film about Torvill and Dean was made while they were still in the public eye. As I observed when I reviewed "On Thin Ice", another biopic about a figure skating couple, the Americans Tai Babilonia and Randy Gardner, there is a convention that films about sport, regardless of whether they are based upon fact or wholly fictitious, should be based upon one of two plots. One of these can be titled "Triumph against the Odds", and the other "The Rise and Fall of a Champion" (together with its variant "The Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of a Champion").

The "odds" in that first title can be either literal (stories about the underdog or rank outsider who defeats a more fancied opponent) or metaphorical (stories about someone who overcomes injury or some other personal disadvantage in order to achieve success). "Rise and fall" stories tell the story of a champion who achieves success but then loses it, generally because of some character flaw or personal demons. Plots like this may seem clichéd, but the convention is a necessary one because no film can recreate the drama and excitement of a live sporting event. (In "Torvill and Dean", for example, we see little of the couple on the ice, apart fro some archive footage of "Bolero" at the very end). Film-makers, therefore, need to tell a human story, not just a sporting one.

Sporting films which ignore the convention tend to be bland and uninteresting. Not all sporting champions, however successful, gifted or widely admired they may be, qualify to have their lives made into a film, largely because most do not have a riveting human interest story underlying the tale of their successes.

And, to be honest, Torvill and Dean do not have such a story. They were what they seemed, a likeable young couple who, through talent, hard work and determination, achieved a run of wins at successive British, European and World Championships. Their crowning triumph in Sarajevo was not achieved against the odds; they were hot favourites to win. They did not rise and then fall from grace, turning professional immediately after the 1984 season. (They made a brief comeback at the 1994 Olympics, winning bronze, but that is not covered in the film). What human interest there is in "On Thin Ice" derives from Tai Babilonia's fight against depression and drug addiction after leaving competitive skating; there is nothing comparable in the Torvill and Dean story.

Because of my interest in the sport I often watch films about figure skating when they come on television. There are occasional good ones, such as the excellent "I, Tonya", one of the best films of 2017, but then that was about Tonya Harding, who had enough human interest in her life-story to fill several volumes. More often I am disappointed, and "Torvill and Dean" is one of the disappointments, a bland and insipid biopic. Anyone who wants to know more about the real Jayne and Christopher should watch the recordings of their performances on Youtube. 3/10.