Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
THAT’S SNOWBIZ!
As they return to the ice after four years, Torvill and Dean reveal why even dodgy knees can’t stop the passion of their partnership
They weren’t together on Valentine’s Day this year, but how thrilling that Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, everyone’s favourite couple-who-aren’t-a-couple, made a point of calling each other to mark the day, as they do every year.
Isn’t it a bit odd, though, to observe Valentine’s Day considering how they’re always at pains to stress that they’re not romantically involved?
Actually no. For it was on 14 February in 1984 that they made history by winning Olympic gold in Sarajevo in the ice dancing with their now iconic Bolero routine. Who needs Valentine’s Day when you can toast Bolero Day?
‘If we aren’t together we always call each other and say, “Happy Bolero Day”,’ admits Jayne. Alas there isn’t a card for the occasion. ‘But maybe there should be,’ laughs Chris.
Now, 20 years since they retired from professional skating, they think it’s quite fitting that their great Bolero triumph took place on a day already synonymous with romance and flowers and dreams coming true.
‘It was Valentine’s Day. It was the Olympics. It was Bolero. It was the culmination of everything we’d worked for. All the stars were aligned,’ says Chris.
What’s odd, when they watch the footage, however, is how subdued they were as that unprecedented row of 6.0s flashed up on the scoreboards.
‘I find it really funny now. If I was doing it today I’d be jumping up and down and punching the air, like the kids do now,’ admits Jayne. ‘But in those days you were conditioned not to react like that. There was no hugging each other at the end of your performance or punching the air. You’d get up and curtsey and then maybe smile.’ ‘We were old school,’ nods Chris. Of course, they weren’t at all. Back in the day they were considered revolutionaries, so much so that the rules of their sport changed immediately after Bolero. As their fans will know, Ravel’s Bolero was at first deemed too long for their routine because it exceeded the time allowed. They got round the rules by kneeling on the ice for the opening bars. ‘They changed the rules after that so the action started when the body moved, not when the blade went to the ice,’ recalls Jayne. ‘And lying on the ice, as we did, isn’t allowed any more either,’ adds Chris. So their Bolero routine was effectively rendered unrepeatable in a competitive setting.
Not that the British public has ever stopped clamouring to see it. When Torvill and Dean embraced the glittery new chapters of their career, first with their own ice dance shows which they performed around the world until 1998; then, having been enticed out of retirement in 2006, on TV at the helm of ITV’s hit entertainment show Dancing On Ice, Bolero came too – viewers expected to see them perform it.
When Dancing On Ice – a sort of ice-dancing Strictly featuring celebrities partnered with professional skaters competing in the rink – went off the air four years ago, it was thought that the couple had hung up their Bolero boots for good. But now the show has made a triumphant return to prime time, with 8.6 million viewers tuning into the launch and several critics saying it’s just the cheerful show to get us through wintry Sunday nights. It was such a success that, within three weeks, a new series was commissioned for 2019.
Were ITV mad to axe it (after all, as much as we love Strictly, there is more potential for dastardly drama on an icy dancefloor and for celebrities to injure themselves)? If Torvill and Dean were furious at the time they aren’t showing it now. ‘Actually we were shattered so we were looking forward to a break,’ says Jayne. ‘It’s only recently I started to think how much I missed it. So when they said they wanted to bring it back, we were both very much up for it.’ Torvill and Dean haven’t yet performed on this year’s show – they’ve been on the judging panel. But they will get their skates on for the grand final a week tomorrow. And they’ll also perform during the national Dancing On Ice tour that follows, featuring celebrities from the series including TV presenter Donna Air, reality star Kem Cetinay, singer Jake Quickenden and Bucks Fizz member Cheryl Baker and their professional partners, as well as past champion Ray Quinn and, of course, Jayne and Chris as judges.
The pair won’t reveal whether they’ll choose Bolero for either the grand final or the tour. But they do admit that being back on the ice together after four years is more demanding than they expected. ‘I mean, I’m nearly ready for my bus pass,’ says Chris, talking about his arthritic knees. It is rather shocking to discover that he is 59, while Jayne is 60. Jayne admits she isn’t as bendy as she used to be either. ‘We were nervous when we skated together the other day because it was the first time in four years,’ says Chris. ‘It was two days of hell. We left at quite a high level and some of those skills have lost their edge, so you have to work to get them back.’ What of the chemistry? Is it still there? ‘Yes, but it will evolve,’ says Chris. ‘At the moment we’re focusing on getting the skating right, then we move into performance mode.’
In the flesh, they still look like pro- fessional athletes. ‘I go to the gym more when I’m not skating,’ admits Jayne. ‘You realise the benefits of keeping the muscle groups in shape.’ And they laugh about how she can’t afford to bulk up – Chris’s knees can’t take any extra pounds. ‘He’ll start grunting, oh yeah, he definitely notices,’ she says, as he nods furiously.
How much do they skate when they aren’t performing? Chris, whose home is in the US, says he’s on the ice most days, choreographing for the new crop of top skaters. ‘I live five minutes, if that, from a rink.’ But Jayne, who lives in East Sussex, says, ‘I don’t skate unless I’m preparing for something. I don’t live near a rink. I’m two hours from one.’ What? ‘Did you think my house would be next door to one?’ she laughs. ‘No. Sometimes I’ll take the kids but just for fun.’ Her children Kieran, 15, and Jessica, 11, who she adopted with her husband, sound engineer Phil Christensen, can skate, she says, but aren’t serious about it. Chris’s teenage sons – from his second marriage, to US figure skater Jill Trenary – are older (Jack is 19, while Sam is 17), and don’t skate at all. ‘I’ve never put pressure on them,’ he says. ‘I feel very strongly that it has to come from them. The thing about us is we were never pushed. There was no
‘Chris notices if I put on weight, he’ll be grunting’
pressure from parents or coaches, or anyone. It all came from ourselves.’
There’s a lot of talk of ‘the kids’ today in a more general sense. They chat away about this year’s celebrities on Dancing On Ice. Who do they think stood out from the off? ‘Kem, Jake and Donna,’ says Chris. Donna has since been eliminated, and all bets are off for the final. Alas, too, there aren’t any hilarious no-hopers, like past contestant Joe Pasquale, who tripped trying to climb a podium during one routine in 2013, to provide telly gold. ‘When we first started doing Dancing On Ice, we thought it was important to only have people who could skate,’ says Chris. ‘ Then we realised we needed the entertainment factor too.’
At the other end of the scale, the pair have watched the figure skaters at this year’s Winter Olympics with an expert eye. Chris was involved in choreographing routines for four couples taking part, and takes quiet pride in his role (‘as part of the pyramid of support’) with the Germans Aljona Savchenko and Bruno Massot, who took gold in the figure skating pairs. Should he not be Team GB all the way? ‘You work for whoever asks. It’s like football. The sport is a global one.’
It was heart-stopping for them to see another couple whose routine Chris had choreographed hit the headlines for the wrong reasons, when French dancer Gabriella Papadakis had a wardrobe malfunction which exposed her nipple. It’s the stuff of nightmares, admits Jayne. ‘I’ve had it happen, in a professional show in New York. I was wearing a halterneck dress we’d had altered to better secure the clasp. Unfortunately it came undone. I spent most of the routine swapping hands trying to hold it up. It was awful.’
They seem in awe of how much the sport has changed these days. ‘The jumps are more impressive, it’s faster,’ says Chris. And competitive, no? Quite how cut-throat the skating world can be has been underlined by the film I, Tonya, which revisits the time when the husband and bodyguard of US skater Tonya Harding conspired to injure Nancy Kerrigan, a fellow Olympic hopeful. Two men were hired to hit her knee with an iron bar. Torvill and Dean were at the 1994 Olympics when the scandal was at its height. Chris says, ‘People were fascinated by this white swan/ black swan idea, one representing purity and the other the dark side.’
They may not yet have had Hollywood scriptwriters asking to write their story, but no skating couple since has managed to achieve their iconic status. Watching them in the flesh is an eyeopener. Rarely do you see a pair so physically in sync. Even while eating lunch they’re tactile. She frequently touches his arm or leg, and during our photoshoot they fall effortlessly into each other’s arms. It’s hilarious to learn it wasn’t always thus. ‘We must have been 15 when we were paired up,’ says Chris who, l ike Jayne, is from Not t ingham. ‘I remember the coach asking us to get in hold but to get closer. She kept saying, “More contact”. We were sticking our bums out rather than in.’ Jayne rolls her eyes. ‘It was mortifying,’ she laughs.
That intimacy was quickly learned, though. Many couldn’t understand how they weren’t a proper couple, given the passion they conveyed. It’s only recently they revealed there was once a frisson – a kiss or a bit of “dabbling” as Chris put it when they were interviewed by Piers Morgan in 2013. Jayne rolls her eyes again. ‘Of all the words to use!’ she says. ‘I knew the minute he said it that all our achievements, the Olympics, everything, would be forgotten and all the press coverage would be about that. I was right.’
Today they both insist it was just a meaningless kiss. ‘I don’t think it was anything. We were 15,’ says Chris. But surely the fact this romance wasn’t pursued meant that it was a deliberate choice not to go down that road? ‘Very much so,’ he says. ‘We’d seen so many partnerships end because relationships got in the way. We knew if we wanted to do it properly we had to eat, sleep and breathe the sport, with no complications.’
Today they st ruggle to describe their relationship. Chris tries. ‘It’s like a marriage in some ways. It’s a friendship, a partnership, a trust. We’re best friends. We talk all the time. But it’s not exactly like a sibling thing either.’
They’ve now been skating together for 43 years. At 17 they were travelling internationally without coaches or entourages. ‘To get the cheapest flights you’d end up in an airport at 2am,’ recalls Chris. ‘I remember being at Zurich airport and being told by the police, “You can’t kip here”.’
Off the ice, their lives have gone in different directions. Chris has married twice – he split from his first wife, skater Isabelle Duchesnay, in 1993, the year before he and Jayne returned to the Olympics, winning a bronze at Lillehammer. His marriage to Jill ended in 2010 when he became involved with ice dancer Karen Barber, his current partner. Jayne too met her husband through the industry, when he worked on one of their skating tours. ‘He used to be part of the sound team.’
Chris’s partner Karen was a judge on Dancing On Ice except in 2011 and 2012, when she was head coach. Now Chris and Jayne have taken her place on the panel. Has that caused conflict at home? ‘Not that I know of,’ says Chris. ‘ Karen totally understood where they were coming f rom when they wanted a reset...’ Jayne again finishes his sentence. ‘She’s very supportive of the show.’
How involved have they been in each other’s private lives? When Chris’s marriages were in trouble, for instance, did he share that with Jayne? ‘Yes, Jayne was completely supportive,’ he says. She nods and looks at him. ‘If he wants to have a rant or moan... I will be there to listen.’ He takes over the conversation again (what’s striking is how fluid they are, even in speech). ‘We are honest with each other. We know each other and there is that trust.’
‘Knowing me, knowing you,’ says Jayne, and for a moment they seem to be about to break into an Abba song, so they both laugh. ‘But that’s the reason we’re still working together. Being married to each other would have complicated that. When you have domestic responsibilities, children, a business to run. I mean I’m sure husbands and wives do all that, and maybe it works for them. For us, this is the way.’ Dancing On Ice, tomorrow, 6pm, ITV. Dancing On Ice Live is touring the UK from 23 March to 15 April. For tickets and venues visit dancingonicetour. co.uk or call 08444 999955.
‘I spent the whole routine trying to hold my dress up’