STRICTLY EVERYONE WANTS LEN TO THINK AGAIN!
He plans to stand down at the end of this series but Strictly Come Dancing without head judge Len Goodman is unthinkable so…
BY ALL accounts there were tears on the dance floor as Len Goodman foxtrotted off the stage: the Strictly Come Dancing Christmas Special has been filmed and it will be Len’s last. The show’s head judge, who has been with the programme since it launched in 2004, is hanging up his tux and heading elsewhere. At 72 Len has decided he has had enough.
“In 2004 I was asked to take part in a brand-new BBC Saturday night show and who would have thought me, old Len Goodman, would still be part of this amazing series more than 10 years on,” he said in a statement. “This adventure began when I was 60 and now that I’ve reached my 70s I’ve decided after this year it is time to hand the role of head judge to someone else.”
Which is all very well but… what about us? He is the embodiment of Strictly and without him it simply won’t be the same. Come on Len, Sir Bruce Forsyth kept going until he was 86. It’s not too late to cha-cha-cha back into the limelight, although if truth be told Len isn’t sashaying out of it completely. He’ll still be judging on the US version of Strictly, Dancing With The Stars. Not bad for an apprentice welder from Bromley who recently told TV Times: “I’m so lucky I found ballroom dancing aged 21 because if I hadn’t done that I’d have been in North Woolwich working on the docks.”
He makes an unlikely Cinderella but there is something of the “plucked from rags and obscurity to the limelight via a ball” about Len. The son of Louisa and Len, an electrician, and the grandson of an East End barrow boy, he was brought up in Bethnal Green, back then a shabby, working-class area in London that didn’t tend to produce TV stars. Home was a small house with an outside loo before the family fortunes improved and they moved to Kent.
The young Len was a football fan and a runner but started dance classes aged 14 when one of his friends told him that the girls heavily outnumbered the boys. Even so, Len became a welder working on the docks for shipping firms until an accident playing football resulted in a broken foot. The doctor suggested ballroom dancing by way of rehabilitation and a new career was born – in its early stages a busload of his fellow welders turned up to see him perform at the Royal Albert Hall.
Len went on to marry Cherry, his first wife and early dance partner, and after winning a series of ballroom dancing competitions opened his dancing school. The marriage split up when Cherry ran off with a Frenchman and a subsequent long-term relationship with Lesley produced James, Len’s only son, before that relationship too went the way of all flesh.
Shortly afterwards he met his current wife, a dance teacher called Sue, and after a decade together the couple married in 2012. James has followed in his father’s footsteps and now teaches Latin and Ballroom at the Goodman Dance Centre, his father’s school.
HOWEVER it is thanks to his television career, which has recently expanded beyond the dance world, that Len has become a household name. It started relatively late: Len recounted in his autobiography that he was feeling 59 and washed up at a time when everyone was talking about an exciting new television show: “Every time I went to judge a competition or bumped into an acquaintance I’d be asked the same question, ‘Have you audi- tioned for this new BBC show?’ I quickly became tired of finding new ways to say no. Of course I pretended I couldn’t really care less. The truth was that it hurt that I hadn’t been asked. Clearly they thought I was past it.”
His gloom turned out to be misplaced. After an interview with Strictly producer Izzie Pick, during which he was called upon to provide commentary on a video of couples dancing, as well as giving Izzie an impromptu dance lesson, Len was told he was on the new show. He has been its head judge ever since, as the showed soared in the ratings and provided the kind of oldstyle family entertainment so many feel is lacking today.
The US version launched a year later in 2005 and Len has been head judge on that ever since too. His fellow Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli has suggested that the reason Len is leaving the UK show is that even when you’re in first class, quaffing champagne, transatlantic travel can be exhausting. And the US gig is better paid.
Len’s got his hands full elsewhere, recently using his welding background to front a BBC three-part documentary about the making and sinking of the Titanic as well as holiday programmes and other dancer elated work. He also sometimes stands in for Paul O’Grady on Radio 2. But it’s for his work with Strictly that Len danced his way into the nation’s living rooms and from there into its heart.
“It gets a 10 from Len,” has become his catchphrase, a score that could equally be applied to him. Is Len really going to waltz off to pastures new? Strictly will never be the same again.