Chris McCausland, the winner of last year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing, has confessed that he and his dance partner Dianne Buswell deliberately kept information from BBC bosses to avoid raising health and safety issues. In his new autobiography, Keep Laughing, Chris, who was the first blind contestant on the BBC show and won the coveted Glitterball trophy with Dianne, also revealed insights into his on-screen relationship with the notoriously strict Strictly judge, Craig Revel Horwood.
Chris described Craig as his on-screen “adversary” and the show’s “pantomime villain”. He decided to give the outspoken judge “back as good as he dished out” in an attempt to entertain the audience. He relished these moments, which happened live on air, because they weren’t “subject to approval” by the show’s producers and couldn’t be edited. However, he emphasised that he knew “where the lines lay”.
In his book, he stated: “I knew where the lines lay in terms of what is appropriate for family viewing on an early Saturday evening, but I also knew how to push this slightly into territory that the producers might not have been quite so keen on if I’d given them a heads-up.”
Chris went on to say: “I would often keep ideas to myself until we were in the live show. Dropping to our knees at the end of our Wayne’s World jive to perform our ‘We’re not worthy’ bows to the judges took everybody by surprise but brought a little anarchy to proceedings.
“Giving Dianne a piggy-back over to the judges after our Charleston would likely have got everybody concerned about health and safety and risk assessments, if they’d known in advance, so we left that out of studio rehearsals and kept it for the live show.”
Meanwhile, Chris recently confessed that he would have been “furious” if he wasn’t the show’s first blind contestant.
Speaking at the Royal Television Society Convention in Cambridge, he noted that mainstream representation was moving in the “right direction”.
However, Chris turned down the show multiple times as he was “terrified” of the implications if he was “terrible at this”. He explained that if he struggled a lot on the dance floor, it’s “not good for anybody”.
He said: “I just thought, if I’m terrible at this, it’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for me, it’s not good for other blind people. It’s not good for social expertise or disability.”
Chris intended to compete “without a sob story” and use comedy instead. He also said he could participate in the series in a “positive way”, before later outlining something that would have made him “b****y furious”.
He further stated: “If I kept on saying no, who else would they ask to do it? And if they ask somebody else and they get somebody else blind on it and they turn up with a sob story and a little violin, or they don’t put the effort in to show that more is possible, I knew that I would be b****y furious that they were representing blinders in a way that I wouldn’t have represented blinders.”
