The Strictly winner has confessed his concerns about being unable to be the kind of dad that his own father – who regularly took him to watch the Mighty Reds play at Anfield – had been
Chris said that he had worried his daughter might inherit his condition(Image: Publicity pic)
Comedian, Strictly Come Dancing winner and dad Chris McCausland has admitted that he felt “guilty” about bringing his daughter into the world.
Describing how his own dad would take him to funfairs, read him stories, and, naturally enough for a Liverpool boy, took him “to watch the Mighty Reds play at Anfield,” Chris agonised that he’d never be able to give his daughter Sophie that kind of childhood.
“I thought that my blindness would preclude me from being able to do the things I thought a proper dad should do,” he wrote in his memoir Keep Laughing.
While his wife Patricia had “made her own choice” when she decided to make a life with Chris, regardless of his condition, “child doesn’t get to choose their parents,” he says.
But children are enormously adaptable, and Sophie – now 13 – has grown up knowing that her dad can’t see the way her mum can. However, there was one moment, Chris recalled, when it first became clear that she knew he couldn’t see.
Chris wrote about his concerns in his new book
He recalled that he was in his kitchen trying to find one of Sophie’s plastic cups that had fallen on the floor: “Patricia was in the bedroom with Sophie and told her to go and help me find it,” he wrote.
Sophie asked him: “You can’t find the cup, Daddy? Because your eyes are broken?”
It was a shocking moment, he said: “This knocked me off my stride for a moment, as it was the first time she had made this connection with the understanding that I couldn’t see.”
Chris was relieved to discover that Sophie does not have Retinitis pigmentosa(Image: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)
He said that at that point in his life he’d become “comfortable in his own skin” and was successfully performing as a stand-up comedian, but Sophie’s question suddenly made him think about himself in a new light.
Of course, the other anxiety Chris had was the possibility of passing his condition – Retinitis pigmentosa – on to his daughter.
The genetic disorder causes a progressive loss of vision from childhood onwards, and Chris is relieved to say that Sophie seems to have won that particular genetic lottery.
“It has now been several years since we passed the point at which the symptoms of my condition should have made themselves known,” he said, “and I’m pleased to say that they never have. The coin landed favourably this time, and if she hasn’t got it, she can’t pass it on.”
And, he says, he’s come to terms with his early “guilt” about Sophie: “There is lots I’m unable to do as her dad, but she doesn’t care about that and neither do I any more.”
