Goodman: my fears I drove Young away

LEN GOODMAN, judge, has revealed his worry that his excoriation of Will Young led to the singer’s decision to quit the show.

Young left three weeks into this year’s series, citing “personal reasons”.

The two had quarrelled when Goodman criticised his salsa, and Young challenged him.

“Turn up, keep up, and shut up,” said Goodman, leading to speculation of a rift.

But the head judge said: “The old ‘keep up, turn up and shut up’ was a throwaway line. I chatted to him afterwards and said, ‘I was only larking about, Will’, and he said, ‘I know that.’

“Then, suddenly, he’s not doing any more.

“I thought, ‘Oh, Christ, I do hope it’s not because of me.’”

The 72-year-old said intermediaries had assured him it was a coincidence.

“They said that definitely, 100 per cent, it was nothing the retiring to do with me. If it had been to do with me, I’d be mortified,” he said. According to the

Young had been suffering from anxiety that week. “He felt he was under intense scrutiny and he wasn’t taking it well,” said a source.

“Putting himself back into the limelight meant it all got too much for him to cope with.”

Meanwhile, Ed Balls, the former shadow chancellor, has revealed that Gordon Brown, the Labour former prime minister, was among cynics who had their minds changed by Balls’s dancing efforts.

Balls said that Brown had believed he should not have been on the show, but became a fan on seeing him under the glitter ball. After Balls’s

jive, in which he sat at a flaming piano after descending from the ceiling, Brown texted him: “I will never see Blackpool in the same light again.”