A Strictly Come Dancing icon has opened up about his partnership with Dianne Buswell, who is expecting her first baby, revealing that the couple would “often keep ideas” to themselves until the live shows
Matt Davies Trendswatch Reporter
10:44, 20 Oct 2025
Dianne Buswell
Last year’s Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris McCausland has admitted that he and Dianne Buswell deliberately concealed information from BBC bosses to avoid raising health and safety concerns. In his new autobiography, Keep Laughing, Chris, who won the coveted Glitterball trophy alongside Dianne, also opened up about his on-screen dynamic with notoriously tough Strictly judge, Craig Revel Horwood.
Chris, the BBC show’s first blind contestant, described Craig as his on-screen “adversary” and the show’s “pantomime villain”. Chris also noted that he decided to give the outspoken judge “back as good as he dished out” in an effort to entertain viewers.
He enjoyed that these moments, which occurred live on air, weren’t “subject to approval” from the show’s producers and couldn’t be edited, but stressed that he understood “where the lines lay”.
He wrote: “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 McCausland won the coveted Glitterball trophy alongside Dianne in last year’s competition
(Image: BBC)
Chris continued: “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 revealed 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”.
Yet, Chris declined to join 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”.
Chris stressed that he understood “where the lines lay”(Image: BBC)
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 planned to compete “without a sob story” and use comedy instead. He also said he could take part in the series in a “positive way”, before later outlining something that would have made him “b****y furious”.
He added: “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.”
