Strictly Me

SHALL WE DANCE?

‘I love Mark! I enjoy watching him, and for a beginner and a non-dancer like him to master what he has mastered, and do it so well, is amazing. I love seeing that natural ability in anyone – and it is really, really exciting when they have not come from a background of dance’

– Arlene Phillips, Strictly Come Dancing judge

Since my appearance on Strictly Come Dancing there are three questions that I get asked more than any others. The first is how did I get to do the show, the second – from the ladies – is what is Karen Hardy actually like, and the third – from the blokes – is ‘Did you?’

That’s males for you, I suppose. All I can do whenever it is trotted out is smile and shake my head and generally give a bit of banter back, as if it is the very first time that I’ve heard that line.

Karen, her husband Conrad and their family are people that I’m just so thrilled to have had the chance to get to know and, looking back now, it is amazing to think that in July 2006 – when I was first approached about being involved in Strictly – I didn’t even know who Karen Hardy was.

Indeed I had only watched a single show of the previous series, to see how Darren Gough got on in his very first appearance in the 2005 edition of Strictly – in which he ended up winning the title, of course. I did hear about that, naturally, but I’d only ever watched the one whole programme and I’d ended up virtually cringing behind the sofa as Goughy strutted around wearing a waistcoat with nothing on underneath. Sorry, Goughy.

I was in my local north London park with my two girls when I got that fateful first call, from an agent whom I’d known for a few years. He asked me what I thought about being on Strictly Come Dancing and I must admit my initial reaction was ‘Sorry, mate, no chance . . .’

At that stage, in my defence, I really didn’t know much about the programme – apart from it being the thing that Goughy had won, and kept on letting people know he had won – and I certainly didn’t know that it was such a high-profile, highly popular programme. And when I got home and mentioned the call to my wife and my daughters, the two girls’ initial reaction was to fall about laughing.

I also knew all about Darren Gough, and his extrovert personality. He comes alive in the spotlight, on the cricket field and off it, and he loves attention. He is a very different character to me. I am certainly no extrovert.

But then Van said to me: why not? By this stage of my cricket career, too, I had begun to get interested in the process of doing my coaching badges, and being encouraged to think outside the box and learning new ideas was all part of that. I knew, too, that one of my weaknesses was a tendency not to want to do anything different. So, the more I thought about it, and the more Van and I talked about it, the more I felt it might be a good thing to try. After 20 years in cricket, indeed, why not?

There was also for me, however, more than a touch of not really knowing what I was letting myself in for; at first, after confirming that I was interested, all I had to do was go along to what in effect was a BBC interview. Two delightful ladies called Charlotte Oates and Sam Donnelly have the task of chatting to potential contestants and, I suppose, sussing you out.

After meeting them, and chatting about various aspects of my cricket career and what the programme would entail, they said they would let me know. There was no indication at all about whether I was thought suitable or not.

Also, as the 2006 cricket season was still going on, I was very much in the thick of what was a marvellous summer, both for me and for Surrey, and so I didn’t actually think too much about whether I would make the final selection. It was also a good few weeks before I got the call confirming that I had, indeed, made the cut.

One thing I did do, though, during those weeks was call Darren Gough. I had intended to ask him a few questions about the show, simply to get my mind around what I might end up doing, but all I ended up doing was listening to Darren for half an hour or so as he went on and on about why I just had to do it, and how stupid I would be if I even thought about not doing it.

Goughy stressed just what a great time he had had throughout the whole show, and he explained, too, how much he had got into it – the whole process of learning to dance from scratch – and said that I would kick myself if I didn’t take the opportunity to have a go myself.

To be fair to him, he was so incredibly enthusiastic – even for him, which is saying something – that he did help to push me towards believing that it would be fun and a great chance to do something very different from cricket. The call had come out of the blue, but I felt that was even more of a reason to grab it. I’ve still no idea who it was that put my name forward in the first place – other than that the BBC do tend to look quite closely at sportspeople generally when they are surveying potential candidates.

My first glimpse of the glamour of Strictly, and the new world that I was about to experience, came when I had to go to a BBC studio to start the filming for the opening credits. Karen was not around at this stage, as she was still in Japan doing some coaching and teaching, and I remember I took along my eldest daughter Cara for some moral support. Cara, who was nine at the time, absolutely loves dance and has done tap, ballet and modern.

I didn’t know how to stand or what to do, but it was at that first filming session that I met an extremely confident young man from New Zealand called Brendan. He seemed to know how to do everything, and so he showed me a couple of moves and also how to stand. It was kind of him.

A lot of people seem to want to know what Brendan Cole is like too, and whether he is as much of a prat as he seems on the show. I always just give them a look, and they say, ‘Oh, right, he is.’ I don’t have to say anything else!

As the show progressed, though, Brendan was the one person whom I didn’t seem to hit it off with. I suppose we just didn’t have a lot to say to one another, which is surprising in a way because, as a New Zealander, he is one of the few professional dancers who have even heard of cricket, let alone know what I do for a living.

It was even more disappointing, though, that he didn’t seem to give Karen and me more support and backing as the show went along because he is very friendly with Karen’s husband, who is also from New Zealand. He kept being more supportive of others in the competition, and some of the comments he made about us were perhaps a bit surprising. I didn’t have a problem if he preferred to support other couples, of course, but there did seem to be a little bit of tension there when it came to us.

The first time I met Karen was obviously a big moment – for both of us, I would guess! I was taken to a dance studio in Hackney (which we were to use a lot for our training), but it was all a bit top-secret at the time, and of course there were cameras there to record our meeting and the subsequent first session together.

I was pretty nervous about meeting her, but from the moment she walked through the door she made me feel very much at ease. She was very relaxed and very friendly, and a gorgeous lady. What she also did at that first practice session, which I appreciated, was to sit me down and talk about the fact that, as dance partners, we would have to be very close to each other – and to be in each other’s personal space in a way that is not natural at all for people who have never met before.

Karen said that I was not to worry about it, and that it was something that we would quickly get used to. It is obviously an important aspect of dancing – you simply have to get physically very close to someone in order to dance properly and well – but it was good that she flagged this up very early and therefore dealt with this awkward aspect of our partnership right at the outset.

She also didn’t know anything about cricket, or who I was, which I loved, and you will already have read in Karen’s foreword about what happened at the end of our first session, when she asked me for my full name in order to put my number into her mobile phone. But that was funny, and it further broke the ice, and I left for home that day feeling that I had been very lucky indeed to be partnered with such a nice person.

One thing, too, that immediately became clear at our first meeting was that Karen likes to talk . . . a lot. But that was good, because I don’t! Right from the start, our two personalities seemed to complement each other, and I did feel very much at ease despite that first dancing session being anything but comfortable for me. It was so different. And I felt a bit weird, to be honest. It’s just that it feels that you are mincing around the floor, which is hard to do in a serious way, and for me that was something else to overcome all the way through the show.

What became abundantly clear very quickly, meanwhile, was the fact that Karen is very popular with everyone connected to the show. She’s very good with people, and very bubbly, but whoever it was – camera crew, make-up, wardrobe – you got to see that they lit up when Karen was around.

And it was her special personality that helped me to come out of myself as the show went on; it is highly unlikely that I could have built the same rapport with any of the other dancers. For that, of course, I must say a huge thanks to the ladies in casting. They make the decisions, based on their interviews with the amateurs, about who gets paired with whom and, as far as I am concerned, they did their job brilliantly.

At our first practice, after a bit of an initial chat, we began with a cha-cha to the J-Lo song ‘Let’s Get Loud’. It was pretty cringe-making for me, as it was the first experience of seeing myself in the full-length mirrors that are on the wall of the studio. You soon get used to it, of course, but initially you are so self-conscious. I did pick up the steps reasonably quickly, though, and it was encouraging that Karen seemed very happy with what we had done as a start.

It was obvious, right from the first minutes of our partnership, that Karen was also a quite outstanding teacher. I knew by then that she had been the last British female dancer to be a world champion at Latin dance, and so that meant an immediate respect for her own individual ability. In my eyes, that put her up on a level with some of the very best cricketers I had ever played with or against. But it was her patience, and her coaching skills, which struck the most powerful chord with me.

She had been retired from competitive dancing for five years, but it is not for nothing that she is rated as a top coach. She managed me very cleverly and very well for the whole 14 weeks of Strictly, whether that was by encouraging me and boosting me up or by judging perfectly when she could take the mickey, or needle me, in the knowledge that it was exactly the right way at that time to push me on again and drive me to improve my performance.

The first time I met my fellow competitors was on the first performance day. That, too, was quite an occasion because some of them – Emma Bunton, Peter Schmeichel, Matt Dawson – were people who had achieved massive things in their respective fields. I hadn’t met any of them before, either, and so in some ways that was quite daunting.

What I also remember about that day was that I felt a right idiot because I turned up a bit late and was the last there – and I was still dressed in my scruffy old Surrey training top and tracksuit trousers. All the other celebrities were in casual clothes, or rather designer tops and jeans or smart casual. Karen had suggested that we do some training earlier in the day and I had just not bothered to change. One of the girls said, ‘Oh, so you must be the cricketer,’ and I wanted to curl up!

For the first three or four days of our training, everything seemed to be going smoothly and, by and large, it was all very nice and well-mannered and polite between us. But Karen wants to have fun when she is working, too, and she was keeping up a constant stream of banter with me.

I remember, after the fourth day, thinking to myself that night that it was time that I had a bit of a go back. I decided that I shouldn’t just be on the receiving end of the banter. And so, the next day, I came back at her on a couple of early occasions and she loved it. Indeed later she told me she was delighted to see that change in my personality – or, rather, the real me coming out. She said that it was the moment she felt we began to establish a chemistry and a rapport.

It was when we really began to get a lot of fun out of the dancing that Karen believed that we might be proper contenders.

When I look back at those three months or so of intense training myself, I also recognise just what a privileged position I was in. There I was, a complete and utter beginner, being coached and taught to dance by a world champion. Try to imagine a cricketing equivalent: it’s like a world star putting in five or six hours a day of coaching, for fourteen weeks, with someone who had never picked up a cricket bat or bowled a ball. She must have had the patience of a saint.

Some of the show’s early publicity shots were also filmed at the Oval, which was rather embarrassing for me, as all the Surrey offices look out over the pitch – and that’s where the promotional video was going to be filmed! Needless to say, a lot of the staff also ‘just happened’ to be wandering around the ground as I was walking out in all my dancing gear.

Getting ready for the shot was also quite amusing. It took me five minutes in the make-up room, but of course Karen and the other girls were in there for hours, getting their hair just right and all the rest. This was a routine that I was to become all too familiar with over the weeks ahead!

But it was also funny to see her, just for that day, come into my environment. I knew my way around the Oval, and I knew everyone there, whereas she had never been there before. Karen was struggling a little bit at the time with a shoulder niggle, so I took her to see the Surrey physio, Dale Naylor, and he was able to help her with the problem. This was about a week into the show, so it was nice for me to be able to introduce her to a bit of my world.

For the professional dancers, the weekly schedule of Strictly Come Dancing is full-on and very stressful. Not only do they have to try to teach people like me, they also have to arrange the choreography, decide on the outfits, choose the music and tailor the daily training routines so that – hopefully – a peak is reached with the live performance on the Saturday night.

A feature of every Strictly show has been the public acclaim for the standards reached by the leading celebrities, but to my mind it is the professionals who deserve all the credit. We all get very pampered, and so much pressure is heaped upon them. The whole look, and feel, of what is performed on the show is down to them.

Karen, of course, was totally on top of all of that, as well as being incredibly relaxed and fun and great to be with. Knowing when to boost up their partners, and when to push them on in a bid to make an improvement to the amateur’s performance every week, is not an easy thing to do for the professionals. I take my hat off to all of them.

After about six weeks of the show, my former Middlesex cricket teammate Simon Hughes, who is now a leading sports journalist and broadcaster, came along to a practice to watch some of the session that Karen and I were putting in and to interview me for a column he was writing for the Daily Telegraph. During our chat Simon made an interesting observation.

He said that he felt I could become very good at dancing because, in my early cricket career in particular, I had been an excellent impressionist when it came to mimicking bowlers’ actions. Early in my teens, I had even modelled my own batting style – right down to my stance at the crease – on my hero, Viv Richards.

It was a bit of a party piece of mine when I was a young player. I had grown up watching all the famous Test bowlers on the television and, like a lot of cricket-mad youngsters, I had gone out into the garden or into the park and then tried to impersonate them when I bowled myself. People such as Bob Willis and Michael Holding were on my ‘list’ of those I could mimic and it even got to the stage, as a young Middlesex player, when I would get asked to do a bit of a routine right at the end of County Championship matches that were going to be draws.

For fun, Mike Gatting (the captain) used to throw the ball to me and the rest of the lads used to find it funny. There was one game in particular I remember, against Yorkshire at Headingley, when I tried to enliven the last few minutes of the contest by bowling an over of six different impressions.

Anyway, Simon felt that my ability to copy those bowlers’ actions was playing its part in my ability to pick up the steps and the actions required by a particular dance. He felt that when Karen demonstrated a step or a move to me, I found it easier than most to copy and, in effect, mimic.

I have played a lot of football, both as a youngster and in my adult life, and this was something I definitely think added to my ability to have quick feet on the dance floor, and being a batsman, too, must have helped, in that batting is all about footwork. You need to be quick and assured in your footwork, against all types of bowlers. Then again, that couldn’t have been much of a factor in the Strictly success of Darren Gough: he’s a fast bowler, and a completely different shape and physique to me!

People do often say to me that I must have had some dancing experience before going on the show, but I can categorically say that I had never done anything that could be described as proper dancing. The only dancing I had done was in the nightclubs when I was younger and that was strictly informal. Yes, I loved dance music, and I would dance around happily in a group. But I would never be the first one up!

Soon, Karen and I settled into the routines of our training weeks and, very soon, I really began to enjoy the experience and to look forward to the different challenges that each week would bring. Fitness was not so much of a problem for me as it was for some of the other contestants, although it was physically very demanding and I did get very tired at times, but both Karen and I thought nothing of doing more and more training and upping the intensity. As we got into it, our competitive natures took over. But we were also enjoying ourselves, and that was the most important thing of all.

Our training week would go like this: on Monday and Tuesday we would plot through the steps of the routine. It’s not rocket science: it is just a question of repeat, repeat, repeat. That is how you learn it. Then, later on a Tuesday and on a Wednesday we would put the routine to music, getting the steps in time to the beat of the piece of music chosen to accompany the dance. Part of Wednesday and all of Thursday would be spent polishing the routine, whether it was about the correct use of arms or posture or whatever, and on Friday we would have three run-throughs of the routine at the BBC studio in the afternoon.

During the third week, however, I experienced my first real panic. It was incredibly stressful, but it also taught us a lesson.

We were doing a tango, and for four days – as just described – we practised and polished our routine and felt we were in good shape. We had been in the same studio for all four days and so we had started (and, therefore, finished) the routine in exactly the same area of the room because Karen put the music tape in the machine before each practice. We started, of course, from a place near to that tape machine.

Then, on the Friday, we went to the BBC studio and when the music started I found that, after about three steps, I had completely lost it. I couldn’t remember anything about how the routine went after that. My mind was a total blank and the harder I tried to remember it, the worse it got. It was ridiculous.

It soon became obvious what was producing this memory wipeout and the sheer terror and panic that was coming with it. In the dance studio there were the floor-to-ceiling mirrors on the wall and seeing myself in the mirror had become an aid to remembering the steps in the dance. It was subconscious more than anything, but doing the practice routine in exactly the same part of the same studio had meant that I was picking up little cues from my surroundings. Now, without them and in a very different room, I was lost.

Horrendous is not a strong enough word for that experience. It was frightening, really, because it was Friday afternoon and it was still quite early on in the show. The prospect of having to dance live 24 hours later was truly terrifying. Nerves were pretty frazzled on Saturday evenings at the best of times, let alone when you have seemingly forgotten everything about your routine!

Karen tried to calm me down, but what made it worse was that other competitors were around, too, waiting for their own dance-throughs. And, with every failed attempt that we had, more of them were beginning to watch what was happening with us.

Everyone is only supposed to have three run-throughs, so as to be fair to each couple in terms of having an equal amount of time on the floor, but we must have attempted to get through the routine about five times and, on the last one, Karen literally dragged me around to get it done. Hopeless.

Later that night, at around 11 p.m., I found myself in my kitchen at home going through the routine over and over again. I had my eyes closed, and I was trying to visualise Karen being there and what I had to do. I’m afraid it was sheer panic taking over. I didn’t get too much sleep that night either; I just kept going through it in my head.

As it happened, all that visualising must have worked because the live performance went as well as we could have expected. Well, better, actually! We were a bit lucky to get through that week, but it often happened in the live dance that your performance was worse than in practice, or sometimes above your expectations. That’s the beauty of a live show, I suppose: it’s all on the night, and that creates such a lot of excitement and unpredictability. For the contestants, it can be both a blessing and a curse.

In every subsequent week, however, Karen and I made sure that we never repeated the error of that tango week. We made sure we practised each dance in different areas of a studio, or in different locations, and thankfully I never experienced my mind going blank again.

Those early weeks of the competition were truly eye-opening for me – and not just because I had been thrust into this alien, show-business world and was doing something that I never thought I would ever do. It hadn’t dawned on me that Strictly Come Dancing was such a popular show!

As I’ve said, I went into it with no real knowledge of the level of its profile, but I remember after the first Saturday night show we were told that all the male celebrities would be required to come in to the BBC studio again the following day – Sunday was normally a day off – in order to learn a group dance which we were to perform as an extra element to the following week’s programme.

It was on that morning, as we all gathered, that someone from the BBC casually told us that they had just got the official figures in and that more than nine million people had tuned in the previous evening. That is when it hit me that I was involved in something a little bit out of the ordinary.

As the weeks went by, and the contestants got whittled down to the main contenders, it became obvious that Matt Dawson would be one of those capable of going all the way. He had also improved hugely since the start of the show, and therefore he had real momentum on his side, and that recognition from the public and judges alike that – as Goughy had done the year before – he was making that transition from total amateur to something beginning to approach professional standard.

Why have sportspeople – and others include Colin Jackson, Denise Lewis and Austin Healey – been significantly successful on Strictly? I suppose the fact that we have to be competitive every day of our working lives is a big factor, as is also a natural fitness and flexibility in most cases.

We are used to performing in the moment, too. In our jobs, it’s all about the live performance. Moreover, generally speaking, sportsmen and women have a perfectionist streak in them and the vast majority of us are also big on preparation and making sure we can perform to the best of our ability. We don’t like being ill-prepared because we know it will impact on performance.

In cricket, my mantra is being able to walk out on to the ground to bat – or to field, for that matter – knowing that I have prepared as well as I can for that particular innings or match. That also means, whatever happens, I will have no regrets. There would be nothing worse, for me, and I suspect for virtually all professional sportspeople, than failing to perform after failing to prepare. I couldn’t live with that.

Translated to Strictly, the sporting contestants would look upon the live Saturday evening dance, or dances, as the focus and the point of all the practice and, if you felt that you couldn’t have done any more, you could take the consequences with equanimity.

I also feel that every sportsperson who has appeared on Strictly has a bit of an advantage over actors, or newsreaders, or other less physical professions, in that we are predominantly much fitter – and in some cases much younger. For some, two hours a day of practice is more than enough and they might even struggle to keep up that sort of schedule over a period of time. For us, though, more practice hours are not a problem. In my own case, I never felt physically tired to an extent that I could not have gone on.

The mental side of doing the show is another area in which I felt prepared, as a sportsman. Mentally, performing live is very stressful and tough, but I was able to draw on a lot of the things that I had worked on with Steve Bull, the England cricket team psychologist who had helped me during the second and most successful part of my international career.

I found the visualisation exercises I had learned from Steve were very valuable, plus the ability mentally to embrace the challenge and to enjoy the challenge.

Performing in front of a live audience on the Saturday shows could also be extremely off-putting for the amateurs. You often have a number of friends and family in the audience and it only takes catching the eye of someone you know for a split-second to throw you off your routine.

Again, you learn very quickly that the professional dancers are superb at looking as if they are interacting with the live audience when, in fact, they don’t focus at all on anyone. Mental preparation, and visualisation, was important to me in this area too, although actors and singers have the biggest advantage here in that this ability to look out at the audience but not actually see any of them is a technique they must employ in their own professions.

Often the amateurs get pulled up by the judges for looking like they are not enjoying the dance and not communicating with the audience; it is just that they are concentrating so hard on the steps and not looking at anyone in the audience for fear of losing their way. They are genuinely worried, and nervous, so it’s hardly surprising that they look it!

But while the professional dancers literally act out the dance, as their way of expressing themselves to the audience, I found that it was the music which made the real difference for me. If I liked a particular piece of music, it became that much easier to express myself through the dance. If I didn’t like the music that much, it was much harder. I reckon it would be straightforward to look back at the tapes and guess which music I liked the best, simply from my body language.

For instance, I am a big James Bond fan and I loved dancing to the GoldenEye theme. We also did a group dance to ‘Diamonds Are Forever’, which was brilliant fun. Then there was ‘Hot, Hot, Hot’ – the song I did my salsa to. I had heard that song since I was a kid and always liked it. Dancing to it, therefore, was at once an enjoyable sensation.

As in cricket, with regard particularly to batting, it was extremely helpful to have a few key words in my head when I went out to dance. Again, this is central to a strong mental approach in that it helps to keep you focused on the job in hand. On Strictly, it was interesting to me that Karen also dropped some of these key words into our practices. Clearly, it was an aid she herself used in her professional dancing career and words like ‘smile’, ‘keep your frame’ and ‘head up’ were etched in my mind when we took to the floor.

Despite all the hard work in practice, however, and all the things I could bring myself to the task – like my fitness and the ability to mimic, and good footwork and mental preparation – I still depended hugely week to week on Karen.

An example of just how good the professionals are came in our semi-final, when we were performing the quickstep. As its name suggests, this dance is quick and energetic, and the adrenalin was flowing so much for me that I was going too quickly. Our dance routine, though, had a pause in the middle and as I was stepping so fast I got to this point too early. Karen, though, simply made up something on the spot so that she could catch me up; 99.9 per cent of the people there (i.e. everyone except Karen and me) would not have known that this was not part of our rehearsed routine. The judges certainly did not pick up on it.

Also, during the final itself and in our crucial show dance, we were coming to a step called the New Yorker and I was about to go into it way too early. Karen came towards me and pointed a finger and her eyes told me to wait . . . and, again, her action just seemed natural and part of what we were doing. She was exceptional at keeping me in check!

Karen found it very amusing that I did not have a clue about how to count music. When she initially asked me, I would go ‘one, two, three, four’ to the beat and she would fall about. And, even after 14 weeks, I never really managed to pick up a basic method of counting the music, but as Karen had everything totally under control I didn’t need to, in reality.

Again, in the final, during our routine to ‘Shout’ by Lulu, I was going far too fast. When we soon got to the bit where we had to hold hands, she gripped me a bit tighter and gave me that warning look. We then waited a split second, so as not to go ahead of the music, and then carried on. I’m sure none of the judges would have spotted that, either.

I only live about half an hour from the BBC, so on the live performance days – Saturdays – I didn’t need to get up too early. I would be in the studios by about 9.30 a.m. Of course, all the ladies had been there for quite a while by then, getting ready for the day.

Everyone would be on set by about 10.30 a.m. and then we would do rehearsals. This would also involve walk-throughs of where we all had to be and what we had to do during the opening bit of the show, when Bruce Forsyth and Tess Daly would introduce each couple and we would walk down the steps onto the floor.

Then it would be time for lunch, and during my 14 weeks on the show I had the same thing each Saturday for my lunch meal – jacket potato with tuna. I am such a creature of habit, anyway, but this became something of a routine for me. Why change when things are going well? But most of all, during lunch, I tried to sit and watch Football Focus, which was being recorded in the same building, of course.

In early afternoon, we all had to do what is called Band Call. During the week you are practising to your selected piece of music on CD, so it is important that the live band play that piece at the same pace and as near as possible in sound to the CD version of it. Karen was meticulous in getting this right, even though a live band will always play a piece slightly differently in some parts. That is unavoidable, but the pace was the key thing.

At 4 p.m., we would have a full dress rehearsal of the routine, and at 6 p.m. the live show would start. They were very long days, as we didn’t finish until 9 p.m. – or 9.30 p.m. – in the evening, but they were also very exciting. But just imagine the workload on the day of the final itself: we had five routines to perform, so on that Saturday there were five Band Calls, five dress rehearsals and then the five live performances. Considering the fitness levels I had gained by then, too, I was exhausted physically by the end of it.

During the Saturday rehearsals Karen and I would always make some little adjustments to the routines – some extra fine-tuning, if you like – but by the later stages we were also working extremely hard indeed all through the week.

I remember during the second week of competition saying to Karen that I would be taking one of the weekdays off because I was going to play golf. She told me to enjoy the day because, if we survived in the show for any length of time, it wouldn’t happen again. And how right she was. But, then again, we only did the amount of hours we did because it meant so much to us. We were determined to give it our very best shot, and we were enjoying the challenge of trying to win.

Karen has a little boy, and of course I wanted to spend time with my family too, and at first we gave ourselves every Sunday off. But by the time we got to the last few weeks, we were going in to train on Sundays, too. That was how much it mattered.

My stickiest point in the whole competition, in terms of trying to master a particular dance, came in week seven, when we had to perform a rumba. Most of the dances I really enjoyed, but the rumba is so difficult for a man to do, in my view – you feel so effeminate doing it! It is slow, and you have to use your arms and your hips; I felt so self-conscious, and it was the one time that I got a bit tense, so that even the great relationship that had grown between Karen and myself was tested.

I was having real problems with it. I couldn’t understand how all the male professional dancers could do the rumba so well and yet still manage to look masculine. Eventually, as I was getting more and more frustrated by my inability to come to terms with this dance, Karen invited James Jordan, the professional dancer, to our training to work with me. James helped me enormously, simply by demonstrating the technique so well and enabling me to copy him. By doing this, I got by.

By the end of my time on Strictly, I was being consumed by the challenge and the competition. I think all the amateur dancers who go any distance into it feel the same way. And it can make you very emotional. I remember Jan Ravens, who was dancing with Anton du Beke, getting so wrapped up in the experience – and especially the love of dancing with Anton – that she was very upset indeed when she was voted off.

The reactions and emotions you see on the television screen are not fake. Contestants are absolutely gutted to be leaving the show, because it has taken over their lives and is such fun.

That is why I thought it was so wrong of John Sergeant to walk off the show last year. I know it was controversial, and amusing, the way that the public kept on voting for him and keeping him in. And I know they may have been doing it partly to spite the judges, who clearly wanted to get rid of him. But a big part of the show is the entertainment side – and the public vote reflects this. They wanted him to stay on, and the rules are that you stay on if the public feel you deserve to stay.

John was still there because the public voted for him to come back the next week and he should have honoured that. Everyone else who had been voted off really wanted to stay and, knowing the emotions of being involved, as I do, I felt it was poor on John’s part to walk away when he did.

He signed up for the show and he knew the rules at the outset. He became one of the public’s favourites – rightly or wrongly – and I believe it was the public who should have had the say when he left. There is no way that the public would have had him win it – they just wanted him to stay in the competition for longer.

Tom Chambers and Rachel Stevens were always going to be the ones who would end up fighting it out for the actual title but, in my opinion, and knowing how much everyone loves being on the show, John Sergeant should have stayed on for as long as he was being granted the privilege – which it is – of being part of Strictly.