Strictly Scot who’s tangoing his way to being a national treasure
(But just don’t ask ex-Holby heart-throb Joe McFadden who he’s stepping out with!)
THE thing about Joe McFadden is that he’s nice. Lovely. Charming in a cheeky chappy sort of way, not to mention easy on the eye. So it’s almost too much to take that he’s also a knockout dancer.
Yet over the past three months McFadden has enchanted both the Strictly audience and judges alike with his hip-swaying moves alongside dance partner Katya Jones, winning over the likes of Darcey Bussell and Craig Revel-Horwood with his American Smooth and that final gravity-defying move in the Argentine Tango, when Jones appeared to lift McFadden into the air with her legs.
While female viewers have been busily categorising him into boyfriend or son-in-law material (dependent, loosely, on age), even ballroom pros have been impressed at McFadden’s slick professionalism on the dancefloor.
But make no mistake: there’s a sliver of steel behind that nice guy persona. Because this weekend, Joe McFadden might just become the first Scot to win Strictly Come Dancing. And he really, really wants it.
‘We haven’t had a Scottish winner – it’s about time we did,’ he said recently. ‘I don’t know if it’ll be me, but I’ll give it my best shot.’
He certainly will. In fact the 42-year-old actor – who rose to prominence in the Scottish TV show Take the High Road and has spent the past four years starring on Holby City – has been so entrenched in rehearsals, he can barely remember what life was like before he signed up for the BBC prime-time show.
‘Rehearsals have been going well and I’m now at the stage where I’m repeating steps that I’ve done before,’ he says.
‘But I really didn’t imagine I would get this far. I thought I was going to be rubbish. But the goalposts keep changing as you keep going.
‘It would be such a shame to have come this far and miss out on the last hurdle. But if we were to go home, we have done some dances that I’m really proud of. There would be no shame going out at this stage as the competition is so high.’
McFadden is the only male celebrity left in the show, after beating off competition from, among others, fan favourite Aston Merrygold, Jonnie Peacock and Davood Ghadami.
In the final this weekend he will face Alexandra Burke with her dance partner Gorka Marquez, (the lovely) Debbie McGee with Giovanni Pernice, and Gemma Atkinson with her partner Aljaz Skorjanec. And according to the bookies, he’s now favourite to win.
GIVEN that he started the show as a rank outsider at 20/1, it is an extraordinary turnaround for someone who wasn’t expected to have a chance of getting to Blackpool, never mind the final.
McFadden seems as surprised as anyone else. ‘In the beginning, I was looking around saying, “Oh, they’re really good”, and ‘They’re really good’, and Katya was like, “Don’t do that, just concentrate on yourself, that’s the only thing you have any control over.”’
Yet curiously, McFadden’s phenomenal run on Strictly has given him control of other areas of his life, and he recently quit his long-running (and muchloved) role as Dr Raf di Lucca in Holby City.
‘It would have been too easy to have just got comfortable and stayed forever,’ he said. ‘Strictly has given me the injection I needed to go out into the world and see what else is out there.’
Not so much the Strictly Come Dancing curse then, as the boost to a tired career.
Just last week, McFadden’s Holby City character played his final scenes – shot by a gunman at the hospital, and dying alone in a lift. Fans were devastated.
‘You want to have a dramatic ending to your character,’ he said. ‘You want people to sit up and take notice and there’s absolutely no way they’re not going to do that.
‘As an actor, it’s nice to have a bit of impact when your character goes, instead of just getting transferred to another hospital. The producers have said that they only kill the characters they really like. So it’s a compliment that they’ve decided to kill me off.’
There have been mutterings about stage appearances post-Strictly – possibly even a musical (he has previously appeared in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and, he says, likes singing so would like to do more of it) – and he hopes to take part in the Strictly tour next year, which will take the show across the UK, alongside fellow Scot Susan Calman.
‘Going out on the Strictly dancefloor every Saturday and performing live in front of all of those viewers has given me a real hunger to do live entertainment again,’ he remarked recently.
It’s all a long way from Govanhill, the rundown corner of Glasgow where McFadden grew up with his parents and three siblings. He is still attached to the area, and even visited his old school, Holyrood Secondary, during the show with dance partner Jones to give a special performance for pupils.
Indeed it was his time at Holyrood that gave rise to his career in the first place, after his drama teacher, Camille Skilling, spotted his talent and recommended him for a small role in Taggart, which led to his long-running role as Gary McDonald in Scots soap Take the High Road.
‘They called me up and asked if I knew anyone who would be good for a speaking part and that could learn a lot of lines and not be put off by a film crew,’ Skilling told the Mail this week. ‘He was my first choice and he was a perfect choice.’
Despite his youthful celebrity (he got the part in Taggart at the age of 12, and the role in Take the High Road at 15), the rough and tumble of a Glasgow school meant McFadden was never allowed to form too many airs and graces.
SKILLING said: ‘Children on the playground would sort it out if someone got a big head. So if he did a television thing, we made sure he got straight back to work because he had to make up everything he missed. He was an exemplary pupil and did well on his Standard Grades.’
She remains proud of having spotted his talent so early.
‘He put his heart and soul into everything. He put his guts into everything, whether it was a quiet part or a big part, and I knew he would do well. He was a very nice, talented, natural, genuine boy who never got a big head and still keeps in touch with me.
‘He is still one of my boys, which is odd because now he calls me Camille instead of Miss
Skilling.’ From Take the High Road he was cast in the TV adaptation of Iain Banks’s The Crow Road, which brought him wider critical acclaim and prompted him to move to London, where he has lived ever since. McFadden went on to star in a couple of films, including the Glasgow gang movie Small Faces and Dad Savage with Patrick Stewart in 1998, before roles on cosy Sunday night shows such as Heartbeat, Casualty and finally Holby City, where he has been quietly smouldering on screen for the past four years.
For all his success though, McFadden’s private life remains something of a mystery. He is not married (although ‘Joe McFadden wife’ has become an increasingly popular Google search during his Strictly run), and has never gone public with a girlfriend.
Early in his dancing days on Strictly he was linked with Mollie King, the pretty Saturdays singer who has since been eliminated from the show, with one photograph seeming to show them getting particularly cosy backstage before the launch programme. Yet he shot the rumours down, claiming: ‘I found it very flattering that anyone would even entertain that idea but it’s absolute nonsense. ‘Sometimes I have time for a hot bath, but that’s about it. I can’t imagine having the energy for anything else.’ Although there has certainly been some chemistry between him and his dance partner Jones (who has been married to Strictly pro Neil Jones since 2013) he has never even gone so far as to identify himself as either gay or straight, never mind clarify whether or not he’s ever been part of a couple.
IN 2009, McFadden tried to articulate why he felt so protective of his personal relationships. ‘There’s nothing to speak of, I just think it’s not really anyone’s business,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean that to sound aggressive or confrontational but it would be like going up to that guy [he points to a waiter] and asking who he’s sleeping with. It’s rude. I do understand that people want to know because they know who you are and they want to know the details of your life. But you give so much of your life to the job that I want some bits for myself.’
There is one woman, however, whom he will talk about and that is his mother Frances, who passed away in 2009 from cancer. The death hit McFadden, who was particularly close to his mother, desperately hard.
‘You beat yourself up about all the things that you didn’t do and all the calls you didn’t return,’ he said once.
‘Now with my mates I tell them: “Listen, you’ll never have that again, that love that your mum has for you, you’ll never experience it with anyone else. Even partners.”
‘It’s so different, it’s completely selfless. I was lucky, I happened to have a particularly amazing mother but you will never have that person who obsesses about you and cares for you more than herself.’
He says he hopes he made his mother proud over the years with his performances, and there is little doubt she would be particularly impressed with his turn on Strictly.
‘There’s a bit of a weird satisfaction from the fact I’m standing there and Darcey Bussell – the most famous dancer Britain has ever produced – is talking about my dancing. It’s surreal,’ he commented.
‘Everyone is willing you on. The judges want you to be good. The audience want you to succeed. So you feel like the judges are on your side. When they criticise you, they only do that to see you improving.’
The other week he was speaking to one of the dance pros on the show and remarked that in a year or two, everyone would forget he had been on the programme.
‘I was told in no uncertain terms, “No, they really won’t – you’ll always be the guy from Strictly from now on”.
‘That will be nice because in Scotland I’ve always been known as that guy from Take The High Road even though that was 25 years ago – so now it will be strange to be known as the guy from Strictly.’
Additional reporting: Chloe Castleberry
Jan Moir – Page 27