HOW THEY TAMED THE STRICTLY TEEN TEARAWAYS
Take a group of wayward youngsters involved in drugs and petty crime and with no respect for anyone in authority... ... then subject them to the merciless discipline of Britain’s premier ballroom teachers — and find out ...
RIGID of backbone and surefooted in every sense, Michael Stylianos and Lorna Lee are quite the formidable couple. Former ballroom champions themselves, they have coached and choreographed the best dancers in the world. They are the go-to folk for Strictly professionals ( Ola Jordan is a past pupil).
Michael can even claim Olympic glory. In the Eighties, he was brought in to help ice-dancers, and worked with Torvill and Dean on their iconic Bolero routine.
Their expertise has taken them all over the world, to America, Japan, Russia. What this husbandand-wife team doesn’t know about drive, dedication and achievement isn’t worth knowing.
Why, then, does Lorna admit that a recent encounter with some British teenagers made her want to throw in the towel — a first in her 53-year career?
Because these were wayward teenagers, kids who had been expelled from school, or had been in trouble with the police, who had histories of car theft, violence, unwanted pregnancies, intimidating behaviour and worse. One of the girls had been arrested for intent to murder.
‘We didn’t know that at the time,’ Lorna admits. ‘We were told only that these were “naughty” kids. I only discovered how naughty recently, and I was shocked. Perhaps it’s best I didn’t know — I think that would have coloured things. I was never scared of them; I might have been, had I known.’
Michael and Lorna came to mentor the eight teenagers as part of a TV show called Bad Teen To Ballroom Queen, where they were challenged to turn the off-the-rail youngsters not only into ballroom dancers, but better people. A lofty task, they agree, asking them to take up the mantle where others — teachers, parents, society as a whole — had failed.
‘ It did turn out that we weren’t just teaching them about dance,’ admits Michael. ‘We were teaching them about discipline, manners, etiquette.’
The programme might sound like a piece of frothy nonsense — do we really need more ‘dance journeys’ on our screens? — but, in fact, it offers an astonishing insight not into ballroom dancing, but into the world of troubled teenagers.
The scenes in the early episodes are genuinely shocking. Fists fly when two girls end up brawling. Boys are caught smuggling vodka onto the bus taking them to dance competitions. MICHAEL and Lorna — parents and grandparents themselves — admit they were shocked. ‘We’d never witnessed anything like it,’ says Michael.
‘I challenged one of the boys over the vodka and put the bottle in the bin. he took it out again. Afterwards, he said he’d needed it because he was nervous at a competition. I couldn’t believe it.’
From the off this lot are Trouble, with a capital T. The initial meeting with Michael and Lorna is painful. What do they like to do in their spare time, asks Lorna, trying to get the measure of her new charges? ‘Listen to music and smoke weed,’ says Toby, 18, from Worthing, West Sussex, whose cV of bad behaviour boasts ‘all-night parties, drugs and drink’.
Asked to describe herself, 16- year- old Lauren takes off like a steamtrain, attitude everywhere. ‘I drink, I smoke. I never come home when I’m supposed to.
‘If someone wants to fight me, I’ll fight them without even speaking. I got expelled for threatening to stab one of my teachers.’ Two minutes into the process, Lauren decides she hates her new teachers. ‘I don’t like the look of them,’ she says. ‘ When they started to talk, I hated them even more’.
After the first altercation, there is a spat when one teen pushes another; Michael and Lorna wade in and Lauren is incandescent. ‘They’ve shouted at us for no f***ing reason!’ she declares.
Even before the end of the first episode, chastised for being late for class and with questions having been raised over whether she spent the night with another pupil, Lauren has stormed off.
The first episode also features an extraordinary teen meltdown. Jaymie, 17, from hounslow, West London, is perhaps the baddest of the bad teens. cocksure, mouthy, confrontational, she’s every teacher’s nightmare.
She decides in one dance class that the boys are looking at her toes, which have turned purple because of the cold, and she needs to put some socks on. When she strides off, she is called back and told it is rude to just walk away.
‘Look, I’m going to die,’ she says, and keeps walking. In a side room she puts on her socks and rails against everyone.
‘You lot can f*** off,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to cut off the circulation to my feet because they are standing there talking sh**.’ And so it continues, to the point where everyone is yelling at everyone else and the air is blue. Not a single step has been danced.
‘I decided I couldn’t continue with it,’ admits Lorna. ‘In 50 years, I’ve never shouted in a class. We don’t do that. But with this lot I was shouting. Michael was shouting. We had to get ourselves heard.
‘I didn’t want people from the ballroom dancing world to watch that and think I always taught like this.’
But she didn’t quit — and thank goodness, because the results this unlikely pair get in the end are extraordinary.
The teenagers take dance classes from 10am to 4pm every day for four weeks — and it seems as if they will never get to the point of being able to dance competitively. Every day, the students are marked on their performance and their attitude. Some of the students, says Michael, calm down and start to take instruction within a week or so, for others — Jaymie, in particular — the process is rather more prolonged.
‘Even up to the final stages, where they had to compete, she was causing trouble,’ says Michael.
There are also lessons in deportment and in presentation — another flashpoint. ‘We had to show them how we expected them to look and how they should do their make-up,’ says Michael. ‘ We weren’t always on the same page.’
By the end of the process, they are deemed good enough to take part in a regional dance contest.
however, it’s not necessarily in their dance prowess that the biggest changes are seen. Michael
and Lorna have produced not just dancers, but quite civil young people, who can say a whole sentence without swearing.
Now that filming is over, Michael and Lorna are candid about the ‘rollercoaster’ process.
What shocked them most? The foul language, for starters. ‘I had never heard anything like it,’ says Michael. ‘Every other word was a swear word.’
Then there was the lack of basic manners. Where were the pleases and thank-yous? Mostly the teenagers communicated in grunts.
‘Every morning when I came in I would say “Good morning” and I’d be greeted by silence,’ says Michael. ‘We had to teach them that when someone says good morning, it is rude to not respond.’
Then there were the mobile phones. ‘They wouldn’t look up at you because they were busy looking down at their phones. That had to stop. We had to impose rules.’
The teens are shocked to hear that their new regime will involve getting up at 6am every day, and going to bed at a suitable time to allow this. ALCOHOL and drugs are banned (several of the kids seem to think smoking cannabis is as crucial to their daily routine as brushing their teeth).
They are also told it is not acceptable to punch anyone, or to call a fellow pupil a ‘nonce’.
Some of the teenagers involved agree to talk to me about their experiences and, having just watched their early behaviour on screen, the shocking thing is how nice they are. Jaymie is first up. My abiding memory of her from the programme is of a potty-mouthed tornado causing mayhem.
Is this why she was expelled from three schools? ‘I was a little sh** at school,’ she admits. ‘I have ADhD but it was only diagnosed two years ago. I was always a bit hyper, and some teachers couldn’t handle it. I’m not the sort to go looking for arguments, but I won’t back down if they come my way.’
It sounds as though this programme arrived in the nick of time. Last year, her behaviour shocked even Jaymie. She has a history of driving stolen vehicles and getting in fights, but ending up in a police cell after a very serious fracas was a ‘turning point’.
She won’t go into details, but she was arrested in connection with intent to murder. No charges were brought, but she admits that if it had gone ahead ‘I’d probably be in prison. I knew I needed to fix my temper but didn’t know how’.
her mum was in despair, she says: ‘She stuck by me, but she said I had to sort myself out.’
how did Michael and Lorna reach her? It seems they just persevered, and somehow managed to convince her that they were trying to help her, not antagonise.
harvey Allpress, from Woking, Surrey — 19 when the show was filmed but now 20 — dropped out of school before his A-levels, convinced he did not need conventional education. he thinks he attended around 13 schools.
‘I’d say I was rebellious rather than bad. Being in school didn’t work for me,’ he says.
he was sceptical about whether Michael and Lorna could help him. ‘I think the fact they didn’t take any nonsense was crucial,’ he says. ‘They were on to us straight away, but I think they genuinely wanted us to do well.’
None of Michael and Lorna’s techniques are revolutionary. Lorna points out that giving the teenagers responsibility was key. ‘At the start, we had a terrible time getting them to pick up after themselves,’ she says. ‘The floor of the bus we used would be littered with crisp packets and cans.
‘But when we put two lads in charge of cleaning, they started to impose the discipline about picking up rubbish. We didn’t need to.’
Whatever, they did, it worked. All eight made it through the programme and went on to compete in ballroom dancing contests. ‘My heart was in my mouth at the first one,’ admits Lorna. ‘I was worried they’d let us down, but they were brilliant. I was so proud of them.’
At the final performances, the teenagers’ parents were invited to watch. ‘Some of them came up to us afterwards, in tears,’ says Michael. ‘We got all these stories about what a difference they had seen at home. It was wonderful.’
Ultimately, what shines through is Michael and Lorna’s pride in their young charges, and their hopes that they are now on a different path. Several have secured jobs since filming ended, or at least made a stab at coming up with a proper life plan.
Jaymie is studying hairdressing; Toby has a job in a hardware store; Bailey is training to be a boxer; Keri is an apprentice at a bank and Edward wants to go to university.
harvey has decided he wants to blog and travel, and has set up a website. he also plans to continue his ballroom dancing.
‘They are a great bunch of kids,’ says Michael. ‘They just needed someone to give them a chance.’ Bad Teen To dancing Queen, on 5STaR, tonight, 10pm.