Interview: Anton Du Beke
IT'S a word Anton du Beke just can’t resist using….“lovely”. All the partners he has squired through seven series of Strictly Come Dancing are, it seems, “lovely ladies”, and he is still friends with all of them. And Anton is a one for lovely ladies. Asked how he first became attracted to ballroom dancing, he recalls a day in his home town of Sevenoaks, Kent, when he was 14.
“I walked into a room full of girls and thought ‘Well, this’ll do for me!’. It was an old church hall and my sister used to go to dance class, so I mooched along one afternoon to meet her and walk her home, got there a bit early and wandered in.”
You’d expect young Anton, waltzing and foxtrotting his way through those difficult teen years, to have attracted a certain amount of grief from his peers, lads being lads. But, no.
“I don’t remember getting a lot of stick,” Anton muses airily. “I was very good at sports growing up. So when you’re on the football team and the cricket team….”
Anton pretty soon decided that dancing would be his life. And by the time he met his current dance partner, New Zealander Erin Boag, in 1997, they were both at the top of the competitive ballroom dancing world. Twelve years in each other's arms? There are married couples less close.
“It is a bit like that,” he says. “You do spend a lot of time together. But it's just that you have a common goal. You're both striving towards the same thing. So that keeps you going.”
So has there never been, in all those 12 years, a whiff of romance between Anton, who has an unnamed girlfriend, and partner Erin, who married business consultant Peter O'Dowd earlier this year?
“God, no,” Anton laughs, as if the very idea were ridiculous. “Any thoughts of that disappeared in the first 15 minutes I think.”
Anton and Erin conjure a bit of Fred and Ginger when they head out on tour with their Steppin' Out show, featuring a 30-piece orchestra, a company of dancers and the stars of the show doing their thing. It sounds such a big production, you wonder how Anton and Erin will create enough space to strut their stuff.
“We stack the orchestra up and get as much room as we can,” Anton jokes.
'Stigma'
So what was life like for the couple before Strictly beckoned?
“Globe-trotting, really,” he replies. “Erin and I were always competing, and we were travelling round the world. We had just got back from China a week before we had a meeting with the Strictly people.
“Nobody really knew what it was going to be like, not the BBC, certainly not us. In the dancing world we'd been through the whole Come Dancing situation in previous years.”
Anton was not a great fan of Strictly's predecessor, the plain old celebrity-free Come Dancing, which had been ditched by the Beeb in 1998.
“It was 11.30pm on BBC2 or something, so nobody watched it really,” he says. “You had that stigma of all the Peggy Spencer formation team, the fake tans and the ridiculous smiles. It wasn’t a true reflection of what we were doing.”
To millions of Strictly fans, Anton has now come to seem like Bruce Forsyth’s natural successor, what with his long face, dry wit and debonair demeanour, usually deployed while waltzing ladies of a certain age stoically around the dance floor.
There was Lesley Garrett (“She's a bundle of energy”), Esther Rantzen (“A funny, clever lady. I speak to her a lot still, ask her opinion and rack her brain”), Patsy Palmer (“Patsy's lovely!”). Jan Ravens (“She's so funny and clever... a bit like Esther”), Kate Garraway (“She was a joy to be with”) and Gillian Taylforth (“Gillian was great. It's a shame we didn't stay very long”).
His partner this year, actor Laila Rouass took Anton through to the last four of the contest before exiting on Saturday after a dance-off against Oldhamer Ricky Whittle and his professional dance partner Natalie Lowe.
But this has been Strictly's annus horribilis, what with the ageism row over judge Arlene Phillips being replaced by Alesha Dixon, a knee injury forcing the exit of Jade Johnson, Forsyth missing one show because of 'flu, and a national outcry over Anton telling his partner, after a spray tan, that she looked like a “Paki”. Anton apologised unconditionally, which Laila accepted.
Anton is now deftly sidestepping any further controversy.
Of the Arlene row, he now says: “I don't have any sort of opinion about it. It's so out of my control that I don't worry about it.”
Of the row over his gaffe, he says: “It was sad and unfortunate...and there you are, really.”
Anton and Erin's Steppin' Out tour comes to the Bridgewater Hall on Friday January 22 and Sunday January 24, 2010.
Published: Mon, 07 December, 2009
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