Roll up for your STRICTLY STARS

Joe was so wiped out he had to take to his bed. Debbie got far too skinny. So why are they racing around the country doing it all again? Because, they tell Jenny Johnston, they’re Strictly addicted

Debbie McGee must be the only woman in Britain who has spent January trying desperately to put on weight. She asks for two large spoonfuls of sugar in her tea, explaining, ‘Giovanni says I’ve got too skinny.’ And she seems to agree with her dancing partner. ‘I have lost too much weight,’ she says, revealing that she hasn’t fitted into the tailored skirt she’s wearing today for ten years. We’re only talking a loss of half a stone since she signed up for Strictly, but when you’re built like a bird to begin with, the difference is startling. ‘Just coming up to the final, I wasn’t well. I was suffering from exhaustion as well as a bug. I was down to just under seven stone. I looked anorexic. I’ve put a little bit back on, but not enough yet.’

That was the Strictly final she pushed herself to the limit to reach, of course. Those high kicks might have looked effortless (who knew we’d see so much of the McGee legs in 2017?), but they clearly weren’t. In the last stages of the contest she was also commuting from the Strictly studios in Hertfordshire to York, preparing to star in panto. Why wasn’t she on her (particularly supple) knees? Well, it turns out that she was. ‘By finals week, I thought, “What am I doing? I’m killing myself”,’ she admits now.

Was it worth it, though? Yes, yes, and yes again. While she and Giovanni Pernice, her professional partner, didn’t emerge the overall winners – it was Scottish actor Joe McFadden who lifted the glitterball with his professional partner, Katya Jones – they could hardly be called losers. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing since Debbie (‘ You call her the lovely Debbie McGee, right?’ says Italian Giovanni, who is still getting used to our quaint British ways) became the surprise star of the show, showing all the youngsters how it should be done. Debbie rolls her eyes and says that she might as well have ‘Debbie McGee, 59’ tattooed on her forehead. ‘The annoying thing is that everyone knows how old I am now. I can’t lie about it.’ Truthfully, though, her age is now her greatest asset. Her agent, realistic about the fact that showbiz shuns the older woman, thinks all his Christmases have come at once. ‘He hasn’t come down to earth yet. And I still can’t believe what’s happened,’ she says. ‘I have women coming up to me in the street just to say thank you. They see me as some sort of role model. Even younger women do. I had a couple of 20-year-olds come up the other day and say, “We hope we look like you when we’re older.”’

In terms of breathing new life into a career that had appeared to be, well, winding down since her days as the assistant to her magician husband Paul Daniels, her Strictly triumph is nothing short of phenomenal. I ask whether she sees a future on the stage, perhaps in musical theatre. She seems to be thinking longer term: TV, motivational speaking. Could we see Debbie McGee – one of the most famous chat show guests of all time thanks to that 1995 encounter with Mrs Merton, who asked Debbie, ‘So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ – host her own chat show? She’s certainly ambitious enough. ‘ I have agreed to do a day a week on Loose Women so I guess if they like me that might lead to more. But I haven’t made any other decisions yet. Musical theatre? Is that something I could see myself doing in ten years? I am interested in the TV side, though. And there should be more women of my age on TV.’

The striking thing about Debbie, as we catch up with her at our photoshoot, is how open her talk of her future is. In contrast, Joe McFadden, who’s also getting ready for the camera, is vague, guarded even, about what the future holds.

Strictly came at a fortuitous time for him, as he knew the character he’d played on Holby City for four years, doctor Raffaello di Lucca, was going to be killed off before Christmas. ‘So for the first time there’d be time to do Strictly,’ he says. But now, Joe is at something of a loose end. Has his agent been overwhelmed by job offers? Maybe he’s being modest, but it doesn’t seem so. ‘It’s still early days but no, at the minute I’m jobless!’

He joked pre-Christmas that he was actually jobless and single, which sounds a bit glum, but he seems genuinely puzzled as to why there is talk of romance between the contestants. ‘I don’t know how anyone on Strictly would have time for that. The pace is relentless!’

Though he’s nearly two decades younger than Debbie, in entertainment terms Joe is no spring chicken.

‘Annoyingly everyone knows how old I am now’ DEBBIE McGEE

Although he has very boyish features, at 42 he is the oldest winner to date, beating Chris Hollins who took the glitterball in 2009 at 38. But physically Joe had little trouble coping with the training. ‘We were doing up to ten hours a day, so everything aches, but I think it would whatever age you are.’ So did he go partying immediately after his big win, or perhaps on a shopping spree, given the £100,000 winnings? No. He says he came down with flu and was ‘wiped out’. ‘I suppose it was that thing when you finally stop. I had to take to my bed.’

Both he and Debbie are back to full strength, which is just as well because they’ve now set off on the show’s national tour, re-enacting their glory moments on stages up and down the country. And yes, this will include that cantilevered lift which saw Katya hoist Joe in a mind-bending manoeuvre – one that has been re-created ad nauseum

on YouTube, often hilariously. ‘It’s been so funny watching everyone try to re-create it,’ says Joe. ‘We had no idea it would have such an impact.’

Many might say that it was Katya who most deserved to lift the glitterball. She reveals that her house is now a two-glitterball home. She and her husband Neil (the redhead is also a Strictly professional, seen in many of the group dances) share a house with a former pro from the show, Joanne Clifton – not an unusual situation as the dancers, who are an itinerant bunch, often do flatshares. Last year Joanne won Strictly with Ore Oduba – meaning that they now have two glitterballs on their mantelpiece. ‘Neil just needs to get a third now, and we’ll have the full set,’ she says. Although Neil was paired with Judy Murray in the Strictly Christmas Special, he has not yet had a celebrity partner, as the bank of professionals is bigger than the available celebrities. Has this caused friction? ‘Of course he’d love to have a partner and for me it’s sad because he has so much potential, but his time will come – even Craig Revel Horwood commented on how good his routine was in the Christmas show.’

Katya is quite the task-master. She tells me that she was up at 2am during the Strictly filming, working on routines, and it sounds like she has to tease the talent out of her subjects. When we’re talking about how her partner last year, Ed Balls, stole the show, she reminds me that he wasn’t a flamboyant sort at the start. ‘He didn’t want to do anything. He didn’t want to wear anything but a suit. But what I saw in him was determination, and we worked on that. By the end, he loved it all. It wasn’t the same with Joe – he could move – but you have to work out how that person is.’

Now that all that stress of the competition is over, Joe and Debbie seem thrilled about the tour. What’s the attraction? ‘Getting to do it all without the nerves of a live TV performance,’ says Debbie. ‘No one is going home so it won’t be as nervewracking. It’s performing for the sake of it. It’s the dream.’

Of course for Debbie and Giovanni – who greet each other today like an old married couple – the tour throws them back into each other’s arms, presumably reigniting all those rumours about their chemistry. Deb- bie giggles about how much people read into their passion.

‘I got messages saying, “We hope you get married”,’ she says, baffled and more than a tad bemused. ‘I mean it was well meant. I thought it was quite sweet. People cared for me, and wanted me to be happy again.’

But with an Italian stallion half her age? She raises an eyebrow. ‘There is a chemistry there because we do adore each other. But we’re both intelligent people. If I was 30 years younger I’d probably fall madly in love with him, but I’m not. I’m not stupid. I just enjoy his company. We have a friendship that will last a long time.’

What does Giovanni make of the rumours? He has, after all, some form for getting romantically involved with his celebrity partners. ‘It happens, yes. You can’t stop it,’ he says, when I bring up the subject of his former partner (on and off the dancefloor) Georgia May Foote, who he met on the show in 2015. ‘I was with Georgia for a year.’ But Debbie? His face says, er, no.

‘It’s funny, no?’ he says. ‘I mean it is ridiculous. I’m not saying she’s not beautiful, but…’ He struggles as to how to put this politely, then fails. ‘She

‘I’m a totally different person than before’ JOE McFADDEN

‘Debbie’s beautiful but older than my mum’ GIOVANNI PERNICE

is older than my mother.’ He also confides that, while everyone thought Debbie was jaw-dropping from week one, it wasn’t that simple. ‘She couldn’t do the splits at the beginning, well, not without me supporting her.’

The best part of the Strictly tour for Joe will be when it rolls into his home town of Glasgow. He spent Christmas abroad so is looking forward to catching up with family, particularly his father. He lost his mother Frances to cancer back in 2008, a devastating blow. ‘She was always very supportive of my work,’ he says.

Joe is a solid entertainer, who started drama school at 12 and landed a role in Taggart at 13. From there he went on the stage, then back into TV, most notably as PC Joe Mason in Heartbeat from 2007-2009, then on Holby City. From an early stage in Strictly he was the bookies’ favourite, and was the only contestant never in the dance-off. He also had ‘the Scottish vote’, although as he points out, ‘I like to think folk in Scotland voted for my dancing, rather than because I’m Scottish.’

It seems to be a tradition for Strictly contestants to talk about their ‘journey’ but while he grates at the term, he understands the idea. ‘I do feel that I’m a totally different person than I was when I started the process,’ he says. ‘You can’t help but change.’

He’s a nice guy, but not the most forthcoming. Little is known about his private life, other than that he used to be in a relationship with the actress Kirsty Mitchell, a fellow Scot. They met on the 1996 cult Glasgow gang movie Small Faces. Since then that side of his life has been a closed book. ‘The kind of job I have means it’s not very fair to be in a relationship,’ he once said.

Debbie definitely had his number from the start, though, saying she knew he’d be her biggest rival in the contest. ‘He was the one I singled out from day one,’ she says. ‘On the very first day we had to do a group dance, I had a few steps with Joe. I could see he could move.’

Joe, in fact, was singing and dancing in West End productions including Rent from 1998-2009. ‘And he was younger than me, obviously,’ says Debbie. ‘Plus he’d had more recent dance training.’ Touché! Her own ballet background – she was professionally trained – was the talking point last year, which peeved her. ‘The thing about Strictly is that you need to have a mix of people who have some dance background and people who are complete novices. It wouldn’t work if everyone was the same.’

This was the first year that there was no elimination in the finals, so there were three runners-up. Would Debbie have wanted to know how they ranked? She thinks for a while, then laughs. ‘Only if I’d come second. Who wants to know if they’d come fourth?’

She and Giovanni are hilarious together. After our photoshoot Debbie is heading off to panto rehearsals and he is going to join her later, to watch. It will be the first panto he’s seen so the stakes are high. ‘Don’t be s***,’ he says, as they part. ‘I won’t,’ she says, rolling her eyes.

Debbie’s happy to laugh at herself, too. She says she cringed at how old she looked when watching her performances back. ‘The thing about high-definition TV is that it shows up all your wrinkles. They put your make-up on at 10am. I was tired. It shows on the face.’

She also admits that had she done Strictly when she was younger and her husband Paul was alive her story would not have had the impact it had. ‘One of my neighbours did say to me that the reason people like me is because I have a vulnerability,’ she admits. Would she

have done Strictly when Paul was alive, though? She says, ‘They never asked’. And she’s candid about how Paul was ‘the stronger performer, the powerful, charismatic one. I always put my marriage first. If I was offered something that took me away from him for more than a few weeks, I never took the job.’

Does she think that Paul would have

been as shocked as the rest of us at her triumph? ‘No. He was my greatest champion. He knew what I was capable of. It surprised everyone else, but it wouldn’t have surprised him.’

Strictly Come Dancing Live UK tour runs until 11 February. For venues and tickets please call 0844 875 8758 or visit strictlycomedancinglive.com.