The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘You could feel their lust melting the ice’
Wherever they went in their pomp, transfixing the watching world with the artistry of their routines, there was always one question that attended Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean: did their partnership extend beyond the ice? Away from the rink were they, you know, at it?
For most who asked, it felt like a rhetorical inquiry: Torvill may have insisted that the closest the pair had come to intimacy was a snatched kiss on a bus, while heading to a competition in their early days together, but that was surely a smokescreen. As the nation gathered in front of the television to watch them hoovering up every medal, the passion, the intensity, the togetherness they exuded when they danced suggested it was impossible they weren’t as united off the rink as they were on it.
Brought up, like Torvill and Dean, in Nottingham, the screenwriter William Ivory has been obsessed by what drove them to such creative heights from the first time he saw them in action. How did a pair from such unlikely backgrounds become the greatest ice dancers the world has ever seen, delivering at the Sarajevo Winter Olympics of 1984 a faultless performance? It is a question he now addresses in his feature-length account of the pair’s route from their initial stumblings to that world-beating display to the tune of Ravel’s Bolero.
Airing on Christmas Day,
Torvill and Dean features fine performances from Will Tudor and Poppy Lee Friar in the central roles. And understandably, given that neither actor is an internationallevel skater, most of the drama takes place away from the ice.
“It did have an impact on such a lot of what they were doing,” says Ivory, of the persistent are-theyor-aren’t-they questions. “What I hadn’t really appreciated until I studied their routines is that there was so much tension within them. A lot of [the routines], including Bolero, are about unrequited love and lust. And you could feel that lust melting the ice. They were incredibly sensual when they danced.”
His film suggests that from the moment in 1975 when they first moved together, the pair sparked. In truth, the very fact they formed a partnership at all was one of the most remarkable pieces of happenstance in the history of British sporting endeavour.
Neither was born to skate: Dean, the son of a miner, grew up in a broken home, traumatised by his mother’s desertion. For him, skating was an escape from the apparent certainty of following his dad underground. “I lived about seven miles from where Chris came from,” recalls Ivory. “It was a pit village, a rough, hard place, nobody had any money. When he got his first pair of skates, he couldn’t afford to go to the rink in Nottingham, so just wore them round the house for about a year.”
Aloof and distant, Dean’s father Colin (played by Dean Andrews in the film) was deeply suspicious of his son’s yearning for artistic expression. By contrast,
George Torvill (Stephen Tompkinson) was his daughter Jayne’s biggest fan, always supportive, perennially proud.
The pair were put together as a last resort, after the intense Dean had burnt through a succession of partnerships. From the moment they moved together, the heat they generated was clear to all. Torvill was keen that their relationship should move to the next obvious stage.
But, according to Ivory, Dean was alarmed that such intimacy might compromise the magic. “Chris was gripped by impostor syndrome,” Ivory explains, “that somehow they were getting away with it and would at any moment be found out. He was convinced they mustn’t change anything. Of course, they were young and full of hormones. But he was terrified that, as his fumbled passes had ruined his previous partnerships, it would destroy everything.”
The irony was that the very fact the relationship was never taken to its logical conclusion informed Torvill and Dean’s success. Indeed, in the film we see Dean explaining his vision for the Bolero routine: it was to tell the tale of two mythical beings doomed never to be together. What we were witnessing on the ice was