Rejoice. Phil Tufnell and Jade Johnson are going to Blackpool. For sport’s remaining representatives on Strictly Come Dancing, it’s a massive relief.

To have come this far only to fall short of a place in next week’s live special from the mecca of ballroom dancing . . . well, it would have left both of them devastated and facing the prospect of a lifetime of “what ifs?” and “might-have-beens”.

Ask any celebrity where in the world they would most like to pull off a semi-successful foxtrot in the arms of a patiently smiling professional and they’ll say the Blackpool Tower ballroom, every time, with the legendary Blackpool floor polished to a sheen, with the floodlights cutting through the crisp winter air and with 90,000 dance-crazy ballroom diehards ramming the stands to the rafters and unleashing the fabled “Tower roar”.

Or is that somewhere else? Whatever. Tufnell, typically, put it in a nutshell. “I want to dance at Blackpool just like I really wanted to play at Lord’s,” he said. He doesn’t say those kinds of things simply because a producer eggs him to, you know. That’s the core of the man speaking.

Were places on the bus north for Johnson and Tufnell ever in doubt? You would have said not after their routines. Tufnell shrugged off the boo-boys on the judging panel by delivering a tango without giggling or earning cheap points for buttock-waving. Meanwhile, Johnson and Ian Waite, her partner, had been giving it some serious Fred and Ginger when the long jumper caught her heel in the hem of her gown.

It happens to us all, of course, although not necessarily on live television and with Bruce Forsyth in the room, and it’s a measure of Johnson’s growing self-possession that she only screamed once and recovered to complete the routine.

Still, in a world in which the talented Zoe Lucker, from Footballers’ Wives, can find herself plunged through the trapdoor at the public’s whim, no one can take anything for granted. And that includes the viewers at home, who were offered a guest appearance by the Bee Gees.

We thought the high-tide mark for musical interlude-based weirdness had been reached earlier in the series, when Andy Williams turned up in tennis shoes and looking as though he had been specially re-created for the night in bonded polymers by Gerry Anderson.

We thought again as Barry Gibb stood alongside his brother, Robin, and reached back down the years for the old, vibrato-strafed falsetto, sounding, in the process, like a crow being fed, feet-first, through a mangle. Still, the message rang out as true today as it ever was: “You should be dancing.” We should be. And Phil and Jade are. Next week. In Blackpool.

Swine flu permitting. Recently voiced public health authority concerns about hand-shaking and spitting in football will have left the pro-celebrity dance organisers fearing a knock at the door. What with the proximity of the dancers, and indeed their semi-nudity, Strictly clearly takes an unfashionably casual view about the containment of pandemic infections.

That said, if you want to see spitting done properly and with maximum contempt for lily-livered health scares, you should be watching the baseball World Series. Actually, you should be watching it anyway, for the baseball. But the spitting is a bonus.

Blimey, can these people spit. The rule seems to be that everybody has to be chewing something, at all times — gum, tobacco, fingernails, advertising hoardings. And not in namby, Sir Alex Ferguson-style quantities, either; in proper, grown-up portions. There was a guy out there the other night who had a wad of gum in his cheek the size of a puppy. Actually, it might even have been a puppy.

And what goes in invariably comes out. We’ll cut to a coach, just as he unleashes a stream of tobacco juice the width of the Thames at Richmond. Or the camera will find a resting baserunner who will be shelling peanuts with his teeth and lips and regurgitating the shrapnel like some kind of human wood-chipper.

And, in between, there is baseball, which is — let’s face it — so much more satisfying and involving for a British audience than American football, or, at any rate, more recognisably linked with something in British culture (although history will surely judge the shameful marginalisation of rounders in schools as one of the great educational scandals of our time).

And yet it’s American football that they keep trying to offload on us, via those in-season games at Wembley Stadium, just because a few thousand people said they quite liked it in 1984. Give up, we say. It’ll never work. If you’re going to bring us anything, bring us baseball.

We’re ready.