TV View / Mary Hannigan: Sitting in the audience for the final of Strictly Come Dancing wasn't, to be honest, quite where we expected to find Evander Holyfield this weather, but it looked awful like him.

Exhaustive research (ie we Googled "Evander", "Strictly" and "Dancing") confirmed it was indeed most probably him because he had participated in the American spin-off of the show, Dancing with the Stars.

Alas, we never got to see Evander doing the jive with Edyta Sliwinska, a performance judge Len Goodman said was "like a bowl of custard that my mom made: lumpy". And that was the end of the one-time heavyweight boxing champion of the world, he was knocked out.

But reading about these international Strictly Come Dancing spin-offs got us thinking - why can't we have one here? The show is bizarrely popular - we're even heard reports of one woman threatening carol singers with a poker when they called to her house during Saturday's final - and we have no shortage of potential participants.

If Holyfield can jive why not Reggie Corrigan? Or Richard Dunne? Or Seán Óg Ó hAilpín? Or Ted Walsh, George Hook and Johnny Giles? And, as Saturday's final proved, sporty types have this dancing lark sussed. Cricketer Darren Gough and former athlete Colin Jackson made the last two, blossoming as the series wore on.

By then several of the bookies' favourites had limped away, including actress Patsy Palmer who was told by judge Bruno Tonioli she looked like "a scrubber in a puffa jacket". Then there was television presenter Fiona Phillips who sobbed when her professional dance partner, Brendan Cole, told her "you must be a crap shag because you can't dance". If Brendan had said the same to Goughie he'd have had to have the cricket stumps surgically removed.

So, as you can see, serious stuff, and that's why the sporty types excelled, because they can handle the competitive pressure. And they're prepared to do whatever it takes to succeed - as proved by Goughie practising his foxtrot in a wind tunnel. Perhaps only the footballers of Armagh have given as much in their preparations for the battles ahead.

Mind you, Goughie still had trouble with his foxtrot. "Which way am I going? Honestly, I haven't got a scoobie," he complained to partner Lilia Kopylova when they were practising, but, on the night, it all came together. "You are the cheeky Angel of the North, you dance as if you were a wind," judge Craig Revel Horwood told Goughie. "Err, thanks," he half-beamed, although the half-beam half-disappeared when judge Arlene Phillips told him he had "spatula hands".

He was up against it, then, but at least he had the support of England team-mate Kevin Pietersen, just back from Pakistan. Had he ever seen Goughie dance before? "Yeah, but only at two in the morning when he's been tanked up," he said.

But Goughie triumphed with the help of the great British public, five million of whom voted once they'd beaten off the carol singers with their pokers.

So, for fear of sounding parochial, we couldn't help but think of, say, Gilesie and Twink cha-cha-chaing to success in an Irish edition of Strictly Come Dancing, or, indeed, Reggie partnering Shirley from Telly Bingo to victory. Or Hookie and Brent Pope jitterbugging their way to the top.

For now, though, that has to remain but a dream, we have to make do with Hookie's campaign to alert Eddie O'Sullivan to the existence of David Wallace. "Postman, postman don't be slow, be like Elvis go man go," he said after Munster's triumph over Newport-Gwent Dragons on Saturday, "all the way to Moylough, Co Galway with David Wallace in a pink ribbon in a box for Eddie O'Sullivan for Christmas." "At the bottom of the tree," asked Tom McGurk. "No," said George, "at the top. Although I know David Wallace wouldn't like to be described as the fairy on the Christmas tree."

He very probably wouldn't, but Goughie had to overcome being described as a fairy when he entered Strictly Come Dancing, and look at him now: he's on top of the tree. And to add to it all his choice of T-shirt when he was practising his foxtrot - "Make Runs Not War" - has made him the face of Britain's anti-war movement, a movement that gained another cricketing hero last week in the shape of Matthew Hoggard.

"We left Downing Street and there were a lot of photographers," he said on the BBC's They Think It's All Over, "and he (Tony Blair) said: "What do they want?" So I looked at him and said: "A photo, you knob"." Hoggard may have to wait some time before he gets that OBE.