Strictly Come Dancing - The Early Years

Strictly Come Dancing has cornered the market in celebrity glitz and glamour with its combination of stardom and ballroom dancing.  But it was not always thus. 

I well mind the time when the height of ambition for a ballroom dancer was to be picked to represent Home Counties North as a member of the formation dancing team.  In those days gas fitters and spot welders sewed their sequins on themselves and that was just the girls.  Nevertheless back in the 1960s being able to dance ‘properly’ was still regarded as a useful social skill. 

My friend’s mother, appalled by our weekly habit of dancing round our handbags at the Top Rank and fired by the romantic vision of us being swept off our feet by a nice middle class boy in a smart tuxedo, arranged for us to attend weekly ballroom dancing classes instead which were held in a room over The Tudor Inn which is neither Tudor nor an Inn but that is neither here nor there. 

The lady who ran the dancing school was tiny.  I mean tiny.  The top of her head barely reached my shoulder and I am only five foot tall.  Bearing in mind she was never to be seen without six inch stiletto heels I reckon she must have been about four foot five in her stockinged feet.  There was a professional dancer, male, who retained extraordinary rigidity no matter what the dance rhythm.  Definitely no hip action there.  He was polite but distant. Possibly he was more afraid of me than I was of him but I never thought of that at the time. In fairness he did wear his own suit.

 There were two other young people in the school, both of whom were long-standing dance partners and keen to enter competitions.  They knew all the steps to all the dances and all the fancy stuff so they gave us a wide berth and just danced with each other.  I don’t think we ever spoke. The other members of the class were all very elderly gentlemen who to our teenage eyes – admittedly poor when it comes to the judgement of actual age – were about ninety. They were definitely all pensioners.

One chap really was ninety.  He sat in the corner all evening until it came to the Last Waltz  (which was always danced appropriately to “The Last Waltz”) when he used to rise with difficulty and gallantly ask me to dance.  Unfortunately he could only manage one turn around the floor after which he had to retire exhausted leaving me to stand abandoned in the middle swaying pathetically in time to the music until I could shimmy discreetly to the door.  I have never danced all through “The Last Waltz”.  Such is the gap between the romantic dream and real life. 

I’m sorry to say we didn’t last the course.  We never realized my friend’s mother’s dream by meeting a well-mannered young man in possession of his own suit.  Within a few weeks we were back at the Top Rank dancing round our handbags. Ah well.