Julia LLEWELLYN SMITH
‘Strictly’ judge Shirley Ballas tells Julia Llewellyn Smith the show’s famous ‘curse’ is a myth – and that she’s found true love
LThere’s nothing wrong with falling in love. They try to make out it’s about ‘Strictly’, but it’s not
ike so many of us during lockdown, head Strictly Come Dancing judge Shirley Ballas piled on weight. “Twenty pounds,” she tells me. “I’ll show you.” After some fiddling, I’m presented with an iPhone snap of Shirley in a trademark swooshy gown looking still fab-u-lous, but definitely curvier and fuller-of-face.
“You see the face of a very jolly cake-eater there,” she says wryly. Aware of the dangers of a boozy lockdown, she cut out alcohol from the start, but there were other temptations. “It was wonderful but I just got carried away and ate all the pasta and rice and cookies and my neighbour baked cakes, but I can’t eat one piece of cake – if I have one bite, I’ll eat the whole thing.”
Reality bit as the 19th series of Strictly loomed. “After all that time wearing a tracksuit, suddenly I wasn’t fitting into any of my clothes. One of my stylists said, ‘I could get you a size 12,’ and I said, ‘No, no, no size 12! I’ll do something about it.”
So for the past six weeks, Ballas has been on a vegan, low-carb diet, combined with frenzied Peloton sessions, enabling her to hit her “ideal weight” of 8st 8lbs for the start of the new Strictly series, which began last night.
After last year’s somewhat subdued affair (only nine weeks instead of the full 13, and no theme weeks such as Hallowe’en), this year Strictly’s back with full sparkle, with only Blackpool week omitted. Ballas, 61, is very interested to see sports broadcaster Dan Walker do the waltz. “He has long arms and that swanlike neck,” she rhapsodises.
Television presenter AJ Odudu and comedian Judi Love “have rhythm in them… Then there’s an Olympian [swimmer Adam Peaty], so he’ll be super athletic, a same-sex couple [ Bake Off winner John Whaite] and Rose Ayling-Ellis, who’s deaf so she’ll be learning the routines by vibrations. But we’ll be treating her exactly the same as we treat everybody else because it’s a dance competition,” Ballas continues, suddenly in stern head-judge mode. “And I know that that’s what she wants.”
What does she think of reports that BBC bosses have threatened to boot out contestants who succumb to the Strictly “curse” of extracurricular nookie? “I haven’t heard about this! There’s nothing wrong with people coming together and falling in love. Look at [professional dancer] Gorka Marquez and that lovely lady [former contestant Gemma Atkinson] he’s with – they’ve had a baby. It goes on all over the world whether you work at a bank or at the airport. They try to make out it’s about Strictly, but it’s not.”
After all, it was at work that Ballas, formerly several times a world champion Latin dancer and internationally renowned dance coach, met her partner, actor Danny Taylor, 48, when they were both in panto in her native Liverpool in 2018. She played the Good Fairy, Taylor was the villainous Fleshcreep. “He’s still in my phone under that name.”
They gelled in the rehearsal room. “One day he was stood there with the light behind him, he’s got jet black hair and big blue eyes and I thought: ‘This guy’s pretty cute!’ He was kind to everybody, he just had that really soft nature. So I fell in love with him.”
At first, Taylor was oblivious, preoccupied by the ending of a 15-year relationship. “He was struggling, he was totally in love with his then girlfriend and he was dismissed from that relationship really cruelly. But I happened to be there and somebody’s trash is somebody else’s gold.”
Having been married twice before to professional dancers, Sammy Stopford and Mark “Corky” Ballas, father of her 35-year-old son Mark, who’s also a pro, Ballas loved the fact that Taylor had no idea who she was. “He thought it was Shirley Bassey coming in. He didn’t want to be a world champion. All my other boyfriends wanted something from me and they all became successful – one became world champion, one became rising star champion – and then they moved on.”
Initially, she fretted she was too old for him (she’s irritated by comments about toyboys – “it’s sexist. Men have been going out with younger women for decades”). But after four months, he told Ballas he loved her, “though it took a good six months for him to repeat it again”.
Come the first lockdown, the couple decided to bubble at Ballas’s palatial home in Dulwich, south-east London, where she’s now sitting in a blue dressing gown at her kitchen island.
“Before lockdown, we’d been seeing each other once a week because he was always on the road with his shows, so now we thought we’d get to know each other a bit better.”
Ballas laid down ground rules. “I couldn’t do with a man who lounged on the couch and drank beer. I shared with Danny how I run a house – these are the things that are important to me and you have to pull your weight. We both have to clean, we both have to wash, the he last one out of bed makes the bed. And I taught him to spot things: if f there are things on the floor, don’t on’t walk past them. Now I think hink he has quite a good eye.” e.”
For months, Ballas cooked and Taylor washed up, they worked out and she gave him m some dancing g lessons. “We could uld go to a dinner dance now and get on OK, but that’s that.” at.” Is that a relief after ter decades of dance-obsessed e-obsessed partners? s? “For sure,” she says s with feeling.
This summer, directly after Ballas had had her first jab, both were struck ruck down with
Covid. “I I was in bed for two weeks, and it took me about eight weeks to get back on the Peloton for five minutes. Danny still has long-term effects of muscle problems, because he’s asthmatic, but we’re both trying to get on with things.”
Will they marry? “I wouldn’t rule it out.” She’s met Taylor’s young son, Sonny, a couple of times. “He’s a lovely little boy and Danny’s a great father – so hands-on.”
With Taylor away touring with Blood Brothers, Ballas is hosting her mother, 84-year-old Audrey Rich. “She’s queen bee, she’s already ruling the roost,” Ballas laughs, gesturing at shelves above her bar area. “Yesterday, she took those ornaments and washed every one of them by hand.” Soon Rich is planning to move in permanently. “It’ll It ll be so nice to have someone to come home to, we climb into bed and watch telly together.”
Quality time’s even more important since Rich has been suffering from colon cancer for the past two years. “Though now they’ve gone from checking her every three months to every six months.” Cancer haunts Ballas, two of her aunts and her great-grandfather died of the disease and Ballas has had cells removed from her womb after a dodgy smear. She hadn’t heard about the recent death of Girls
Aloud singer Sarah Harding from breast cancer aged 39, and is horrified when I say Harding delayed having symptoms checked because of Covid. “I would have taken a chance and seen the doctor,” she sighs.
Ballas proactively reduced her chances of missing such a diagnosis two years ago, after a nurse conducting a mammogram mentioned she couldn’t see behind her breast implants.
“The penny dropped, I decided: ‘OK, we need to get rid of them.’” She’d had the implants inserted 19 years before to please her second husband. “I thought he might love me a bit more if I had a betterlooking body. But that didn’t work, and there was nothing wrong with my boobs in the first place.” A four-hour operation saw her go down from a 34DD to a stillimpressive 34C. “Now I love my little boobs and Danny says the scars look like smiley faces, they’re saying ‘Hi Danny!’”
It’s lovely to see Ballas – who in her early Strictly days could come across as a tad defensive – so at ease. “I’ve always been confident with anything dance related, but from a small child, I was just not secure about my body, my face and hair. But I am getting better. It definitely helps having a boyfriend that loves everything about you, warts and all. He doesn’t care if I have no make-up on – he loves what’s inside.”
I’m not sure I can take hearing much more about this paragon. “Oh, no man is perfect, darling,” Ballas beams. “But with Danny, we’re working towards it.”