Give us a twirl! The Strictly stars ready to waltz into spotlight
THEY haven’t had a lesson yet but this year’s contestants have already passed their first Strictly test – posing in sequins with a sparkly smile.
Embracing glitz and glamour is all part of the challenge and the cast of 2016 are ready to whirl, twirl and waltz into action on the dancefloor.
The 14th series of the BBC hit starts on Saturday when the celebrities will discover which professional dancer they will be paired up with.
They will then have three weeks to train before returning to the ballroom to perform live every Saturday night.
Below we introduce you to the 15 vying for the Glitterball Trophy:
1. THE POCKET ROCKET RADIO HOST
Melvin Odoom, 36, Kiss radio presenter AS the shortest man, finding a dance partner who can look him in the eye is his key to success: ‘I’ve been told I should have someone who is roughly the same height as me. As long as I get someone I can spin around comfortably I’ll be good!’
2. THE US SUPERSTAR SINGER
Anastacia, 47, singer HER battle with breast cancer has reignited the singer’s passion for dance: ‘I had a double mastectomy so for me it was kind of getting in touch with my female body.’
3. THE LEAPING OLYMPIAN
Greg Rutherford, 29, Olympic long jump medallist IT’S not the outfits that worry him, but his footwork: ‘ I have to usually jump in a very tight vest and shorts so I’m fine with that stuff – it’s more that I hate not being good at things.’
4. THE GLAMOROUS BLONDE
Laura Whitmore, 31, TV presenter SHE is most looking forward to the jive because it reminds her of her Irish family: ‘My mum is one of thirteen, like any good Irish family, so you always see her and her sisters up jiving and it’s so fast I get scared!’
5. THE MODEL PERFECTIONIST
Daisy Lowe, 27, model and actress THE fashionista loves ‘dropping it Lowe’, but will have to get used to taking criticism: ‘I’ve got to try and not be too hard on myself – and not to talk back to the judges when they critique me!’
6. THE EX-CABINET BRUISER
Ed Balls, 49, former shadow chancellor THE former politician he is taking part in Strictly for his wife MP Yvette Cooper: ‘We’re total Saturday night Strictly addicts, but I never thought I’d have the chance to be on it myself. Yvette is hugely envious, she’s always wanted to be on Strictly – so I’m doing it for Yvette.’
7. THE FORMER GIRLBAND STAR
Louise Redknapp, 41, former Eternal singer THE mother of two admits Strictly is her ‘last shot’ at performing: When all of the sudden [performing] is taken away from you there’s quite a big void... you don’t quite get the same buzz of performing in the lounge in front of your kids!’
8. THE HUNKY SOAP ACTOR
Danny Mac, 28, Hollyoaks actor HIS ideal dance partner is: ‘Someone who can communicate telepathically to let me know what it is I’ve got
to do next because I will not remember – I’ve got the memory of a goldfish!’
9. THE EASTENDER
Tameka Empson, 39, eastenders actress STRICTLY has always been her dream: ‘when the opportunity knocked, I answered the door and said “welcome, come on in! I’ve been waiting for you”.’
10. THE ORIGINAL POP IDOL
Will Young, 37, singer He has set his sights on impressing judge Len Goodman: ‘I love him. I think I’m bordering on stalker level.’ And his biggest Strictly challenge will be ‘ trying not to be late!’ Ore Oduba, 29, BBC sports presenter He is also keen to impress Len: ‘It’ll be an honour to dance in Len’s final series. But if I can get Bruno up on his feet, maybe even on the table... I’ll be very happy!’
12. THE TEENAGE GYMNAST
Claudia Fragapane, 18, Olympic gymnast SHE is hoping to emulate the Strictly success of fellow Olympic gymnast Louis Smith: ‘I used to watch him when he was on the show and saw how he used his gymnastics skills to complement his routines. But, I will also have to say [I love the] costumes and hair and make- up – I love sparkles!’
13. THE TV JUDGE
Judge Rinder, 38, of ITV show Judge Rinder SIGNED up to make his grandparents happy: ‘I think there is something magical about being able to take part in something which gives them [my grandparents] such joy and escapism.’
14. THE BIRD OF A FEATHER
Lesley Joseph, 70, actress AS the oldest contestant this year, the actress is struggling with the physical demands: ‘I think another challenge will be trying to keep going with the training. I’m not 21, I’m not 31 or 41.’
15. THE BREAKFAST TV HOST
Naga Munchetty, 41, BBC Breakfast host SHE the first to admit she would get ‘ten out of ten’ for enthusiasm, but would not for dance ability: ‘Pop me in a night club or on the dance floor and I’ll just throw myself round and love it.’
PEOPLE will have differing views about whether the former Labour Cabinet minister Ed Balls should have agreed to take part in the new series of Strictly Come Dancing, which will shortly arrive on our screens.
Balls himself disclosed last month that a mid-life crisis had prompted him to sign up for the dancing show. As mid-life crises go, it seems a relatively innocuous one.
That said, his wife, Yvette Cooper, also a former Labour Cabinet minister and still an MP, may not have been overjoyed by pictures showing her husband throwing himself around the dancefloor in abandon with two scantily dressed young women as part of the programme’s promotion.
Nonetheless, to judge by these photographs, Mr Balls will provide a good deal of entertainment for fans of Strictly over the coming months. He seems surprisingly nimble on his feet, and evidently doesn’t mind making a spectacle of himself.
The question is whether this 49-yearold major politician, who lost his Commons seat in the 2015 election, should be spending the next few months twirling and jiving his life away.
In normal circumstances, it might not matter. Balls has a public image that is part geeky (he once put the unintelligible phrase ‘post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory’ in the mouth of his master, Gordon Brown) and part political bruiser. He evidently wants to show us his softer side.
But these are not normal times. The modern Labour Party is in the process of destroying itself. The process may be well-nigh complete when Jeremy Corbyn is re-elected as its leader, as now seems inevitable, in a few weeks’ time.
It seems to me a tragedy that a man of Mr Balls’s talents should be fooling about on the sidelines while Mr Corbyn and his unpalatable crew of extremists and nutcases are carrying everything before them — and depriving this country of a proper Opposition to hold the Government to account.
Ed Balls may have been an irritating politician, but he was undoubtedly a significant one. It was he, above all, who persuaded the then proEuropean Gordon Brown when he was his chief adviser that Britain shouldn’t join the euro.
AS FAR back as 1992 ( when he was a leader writer on the wildly pro- euro financial Times), Mr Balls wrote in a political pamphlet that monetary union was ‘ an economically and politically misconceived project’. He had the gumption to go against the fashionable economic orthodoxy of the time.
Probably more than any man, Mr Balls is responsible for saving this country from the economic catastrophe of the euro. That makes him a pretty formidable character in my book.
It is perfectly true in one sense that he had no option but to retreat momentarily from the political frontline, having been rejected by a small margin by the electors of Morley and Outwood in May 2015.
But instead of vowing to fight the seat again at the next election, or biding his time for a suitable by-election, he took himself off to a fellowship at Harvard University to lick his wounds.
During the slow self-immolation of the Labour Party, we have heard very little from Mr Balls, at any rate until now, with the publication of his rather tame-seeming memoirs, which are scarcely going to set the heather alight.
As a former journalist and practised polemicist, he might have been expected to defend his moderate version of Labour in the public prints against the Corbynista lunatics. He hasn’t noticeably done so.
In short, Mr Balls has deserted the field of battle, and watched as the Hard Left runs riot. Only yesterday, we read that one of Jeremy Corbyn’s senior aides, a man called Richard Barbrook, unashamedly describes himself as a Communist, and appears to identify with Republican extremists in Ireland. These people no longer even bother to dissimulate.
Meanwhile, Paul flynn, one of Mr Corbyn’s closest allies and Shadow Leader of the House, has hardly dignified his office or his party by making the idiotic suggestion that MPs should be given a flat allowance, rather than being asked to go through the time- consuming and ‘ unnecessary chore’ of submitting detailed expenses.
To be fair to Mr Balls, he is far from being the only sensible leading light of the Labour Party to pack his bags in despair and stomp off. Even MPs who did not lose their seats have apparently given up.
His wife, Yvette Cooper, declined to take on Mr Corbyn in the present contest. She and others have left it to the lightweight, inexperienced and, dare I say, rather slippery Owen Smith to challenge the Labour leader, presumably because they are frightened of being beaten. Andy Burnham — another vanquished candidate in last year’s leadership election — has bolted like a frightened rabbit for the relative safety of Manchester, where he hopes to be elected mayor.
These are not men and women of steel. When, in the early Eighties, Hard Left extremists last tried to infiltrate the Labour Party, there were a few brave men who were prepared to take them on. Its leader, Neil Kinnock, was, for all his sins, foremost among them.
A decade later, with Labour still in opposition, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown established themselves as gritty and realistic operators who were determined that their party would be returned to power.
SO WHERE are such people now? Moderates once spoken of as future leaders of the Labour Party — Chuka Umunna, Dan Jarvis and Tristram Hunt — are sulking in their tents, where they are doubtless busy plotting, probably completely ineffectually. And perhaps the most formidable among them is currently limbering up for a season on Strictly Come Dancing. It’s now joke time. Yesterday, Mr Balls claimed (perhaps with those frisky ladies in mind) that he was ‘doing it for Yvette’ and embracing what is ‘crackers’ in him.
No one is obliged to be a politician, or to remain one. But if Mr Balls felt the call once — if he did it not merely to satisfy his ego, but to do some good for his country — why is he apparently giving up now?
When, in 1960, the Parliamentary Labour Party’s line on multilateral nuclear disarmament was overturned by Left-wing trade unions at the party conference in Scarborough, the then-leader, Hugh Gaitskell, made a rousing speech of defiance.
In a famous phrase, he promised to ‘fight and fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love’. A year later, the vote was reversed, and Labour rejected unilateral disarmament — a policy it endorsed until the 1983 election, when it was duly routed.
Where is the leading Labour politician now who will see off the Hard Left infiltrators who, if they have their way, will either de- select or intimidate every decent, moderate Labour MP — and render the party unelectable?
Where is the serious and principled statesman who will stand up to these hooligans, and tell them to return to their own mad fringe organisations? Where is the man who will fight and fight and fight and fight again to save the party he loves?
Why, one of them, at any rate, is to be found on Strictly Come Dancing, where, over the next months, he will no doubt make many people laugh. for myself, I’m afraid, I find it all very sad.