All Balls and Glitter (33 page)

The other judges in my first year were the dancer Carol-Ann Hickmore and Alison Leonard, a dancer turned broadcaster. Since then, Carol-Ann has been replaced by
Strictly Ballroom
star Paul Mercurio, who also adjudicates the Australian version of the show. But not one of my fellow judges has come close to wrenching the ‘Mr Nasty’ tiara from my head.

Indeed, during the first New Zealand series in which I was involved, I managed to offend the whole country. The public wanted me out. They thought I was vile to Michael Laws, the Mayor of Wanganui.

Of course, I was only being honest, as usual. If someone’s mouth is gaping open for the whole performance, and they’re on the wrong foot throughout, I’m going to comment on that. All Michael’s routines were awful, but his cha-cha-cha
was particularly offensive. I committed the cardinal sin of telling the Mayor of Wanganui that his dancing left a lot to be desired – and the people of New Zealand were up in arms.

Because I don’t know the personalities of the celebrities there, I see only the dancing, not the star. But they’re really quite a conservative crowd; I think the celebs are treated with kid gloves by the other judges. When I blasted my way on to the
TV and started talking brutally, they weren’t happy. Brendan is used to me, but the other judges were shocked.

The headlines were horrendous. One said: ‘Visiting judge mauls Laws!’ People were asking for me to be chucked off the show. Oh, they hated me. The TV station was bombarded with emails from viewers, saying that they wouldn’t watch if I continued to be employed as a judge. Then the ratings went up the following week as everyone who said they weren’t going to switch on did, and so did a few more.

What’s fun about the New Zealand version is that they don’t have the wealth of big soaps that we have here in the UK, so there’s no
EastEnders
,
Corrie
or
Holby City
to provide celebrity dancers. The producers rely heavily on politicians, basketball players and rugby players. They have the All Blacks, of course, but you can’t have an entire rugby team doing
Dancing with the Stars
,
let’s face it. On second thoughts, could you? That would be a vision. The NZ production values are the same as in the British version, although they are on a tighter budget, but there just isn’t the international recognition of celebrity.

In fact, the woman who won my first series was from Leeds! Her name was Suzanne Paul. She came over to New Zealand to establish her fortune on a make-up range, which she did, but then she launched a tourism business, which went belly up. She lost everybody’s money and ended up millions of dollars in debt, so she was trying to pay everybody back.

The programme goes out on a Tuesday and is immediately followed by the results show, so every week we have a big party afterwards. We all watch the episode back with the friends and families of the contestants, while drinking free booze and getting absolutely pie-eyed. It’s a nice idea because the loser makes a speech and you celebrate the person who is leaving, and then take in the show, laughing at the judges’ comments and the dances alike. It gives the whole thing a family feel and people don’t take the criticism personally like they can seem to in the UK.

Mad things happen at every bash. There is always someone falling over or flirting outrageously with another member of the team, snogging people they shouldn’t or getting drunk and disorderly.

For example, at one post-show party, we were making merry at a pub called The Establishment. One of the judges, Alison Leonard, had just brought a fresh round of drinks to the table. It was the usual enormous array – pints of lager, glasses of red wine, a couple of bottles of savvy blanc, spritzers and mixers.

Sitting at the bar table on a high stool was the celeb who had just been eliminated. She was so wasted that she went to put her drink on the table, missed it completely, and then tried to save herself from falling forward by placing all her weight on the table with her free hand. At the same moment, she toppled backwards off the stool, flipped the entire table up and landed on her back on the floor, legs akimbo with her dress up around her navel. To add insult to injury, she was now wearing all the booze that had just been purchased. She was absolutely saturated and ended up smelling like a brewery for the rest of the night. It was truly a sight for sore eyes.

On the evening of the final, Alison Leonard was a little bit emotional and cried practically the whole night. Tears of joy, perhaps, that the season had ended, or maybe tears of sadness that she wouldn’t be seeing me any more – I’m not sure which, if either. Something had upset her anyway. When she came out of the club, she had massive panda eyes, with mascara smudged all around them, and looked like she’d been dragged through the wringer. Naturally, that was the moment she was papped by a huge pack of waiting photographers. The resulting picture made the front page of the paper the next day. Poor Alison must have hated it.

Candy Lane is the Tess Daly of the show and she’s hilarious, a real wild child. At one of our shindigs, she was dancing on the tables and then decided to strut along the bar and jump off it into
the crowd. The people in the bar loved it because she’s a total star over there.

All this made its way into the press, of course. In the end, they had to find us private clubs to go to after the live programmes, so that we weren’t in public when we misbehaved. New Zealand is a small country: there are only 4 million people, and 1 million of them watch the show. When you look at it like that, it’s likely that a quarter of the general public know who we are, so you can appreciate the need for a bit of privacy.

The parties never finish until seven or eight in the morning. We do all have such a good time. It’s a far cry from what you see on the telly, where everyone is dressed up, looking beautiful and performing sedate waltzes. You would never imagine that in a few hours’ time the cast and crew would be out on the town wearing next to nothing, slaughtered and sweaty, and enthusiastically jumping into rows of men.

Speaking of which, while I was in New Zealand I decided it was time to get back on the dating horse. Trying to find love after Lloyd was actually a very dark period. I was over forty and the thought of having to go to a bar and chat people up was horrific. I wasn’t used to the dating game anyway, having been in a relationship for so many years – but I was now famous, too, so that put a whole new spin on the situation.

For a single celebrity of forty-plus to go out to pubs and clubs to meet men is awful. People only want to speak to you because they’ve seen you on the telly. I couldn’t face going into a bar by myself, only to sit there like a sad Billy-no-mates, sipping at my drink, waiting for somebody to approach me. I bit the bullet and went out a couple of times on the pull, but the men who came up for a chat were all aged between twenty and twenty-three, which was far too young for me. There was nobody older in those places. Those that did come up weren’t interested in me as a person, either, which was discouraging. As I’d anticipated, they just wanted to be seen out with ‘Mr
Nasty’ or get hold of invitations to opening nights and red-carpet dos.

My next mistake was turning to the Internet.

I had a few friends who were hooked on Gaydar, a gay chat site; two of my mates had even met that way. I thought it might be worth a try, even though I didn’t know much about it. I signed up – and quickly regretted it. I had a false identity, but I put my picture up, which was not the smartest move I’ve ever made. Disaster! After just two hours, I had to take myself off because it was a nightmare. I was bombarded with messages saying, ‘Are you Craig Revel Horwood from
Strictly Come Dancing
?’ There were a few filthy pictures of certain parts of people’s anatomies being sent through too.

It was not exactly what I’d been expecting. I’d been with Lloyd for such a long time that I’d never used these paths to romance before. But the horror didn’t end there. I made the schoolboy error of telling someone backstage on
Dancing with the Stars
about my online catastrophe and complained to them that I was sick of meeting young lads. Somehow, it ended up in the paper. It wasn’t particularly discreet of me, I know, but I wasn’t expecting it to leak out to the press.

The next day, the headline read: ‘Gay judge seeks mature man.’ I was mortified.

In the last week of my first NZ series, my sister Mel flew over from Melbourne to stay with me in Wellington. We were joined by our brother Trent a couple of days later; he had been delayed as his band had a gig in Australia. I hadn’t seen Mel for ages, other than on flying visits to Oz, so it was lovely to spend time together. I felt I could give her my full attention, which had perhaps been lacking over recent years, given the geographical distance between us.

In truth, I find it quite amazing – in view of the two decades that I have spent overseas, separated from my family by that incredible divide called the world – just how close my siblings and
I still are to one another. I sometimes feel guilty about leaving Australia for so long because I think that in some ways it seems selfish of me. But then again, I had to do what I had to do. We’ve all as a family followed our hearts and dreams: it’s made us who we are today. And, on the whole, I think we’ve turned out all right.

On my return from New Zealand, an off-the-wall opportunity arose – an invitation to appear on that year’s
Celebrity Masterchef
. What with my extensive Ballarat catering experience and my love of cooking in my own kitchen, I thought, ‘Why not?’ At home, I’m a good cook and I enjoy it. I can have a nice glass of wine and I potter around at my leisure. Of course, I haven’t got a clock ticking on me – and that turned out to be a source of major tension on the TV show. I was really calm before the cameras started rolling, but as soon as I heard, ‘Your time starts now,’ I was a mess. I was just so nervous. The unforgivable pressure of passing time and a paralysing fear of failure really affected me.

There were five sections to each programme and I went all the way to the final, though Nadia Sawalha ultimately pipped me to the post to take the prize. I wasn’t as panicked as I had been in the Ballarat restaurants, possibly because the team were a hell of a lot friendlier than my old head chef. Nevertheless, when they are filming you in close up and you know you have just two minutes left, but your dish takes four minutes to complete, it can throw you. Also, it was hard being judged – as I’m sure the contestants of
Strictly
would agree.

I was shitting myself in the preliminary show, as well as in the final. It was absolutely awful. People don’t realize how difficult it is. You don’t even know what you’re cooking the first time. You have no clue what the ingredients might be and there are no recipes. Whatever they give you, you have to use to create something delicious – in a kitchen where you’ve no idea where anything is, or how to use the equipment. Plus you’re trying to time delicate concoctions in ovens with which you’re unfamiliar. It was horrible.

In the first episode, I was supplied with smoked bacon, minced beef and loads of different types of vegetables, as well as fresh herbs and stock cubes. Then I was told, ‘We want a main course. You have fifty minutes and your time starts now.’

I made a spaghetti bolognese. It’s a family classic that’s deceptively complex: some people can do it well and some can’t. It had to be very tasty to win over the judges. It did come out just as I’d hoped, in the end, but beforehand I was trying to pick out the ingredients and I went blank with panic.

The producer came over to me and said, ‘Craig, you’ve got to calm down.’

I replied, ‘I know. I’m trying to breathe, but I haven’t got time. Too much to do.’

As I progressed through the programme’s stages, I became more and more adventurous. It was when I tried to whip up the oysters and lobster thermidor that I got the real shakes. I’d never attempted such a recipe before and it was so hard.

That night, they had the food critics in. One of them said that my oysters looked like duck droppings. Tasting a little of my own medicine was, I suppose, a good thing for the viewers to see, but I felt really vulnerable.

The whole experience was nerve-racking: an endurance test for which I never felt prepared. Nonetheless, I went all out on the show because that’s my nature – I don’t like losing. Indeed, I’ve always had a huge fear of failure. In truth, though, I shouldn’t be afraid because it’s simply another part of life.

As I was getting to grips with garnish, I received an unexpected phone call from the Ballet Boyz, Michael Nunn and Billy Trevitt. They asked if I would be interested in creating a new work for them. The brief was that it should be something to do with tango and would open the refurbished Royal Festival Hall in London that summer.

The proposal was right up my street. The challenge of mixing ballet with tango was one for which I’d long been waiting. I
immediately set to work on the project, almost as if my life depended on it. Soon, I’d come up with a concept and storyline for the piece. But I had to search high and low for the right music to complement it. I required a distinctive score that would drive the narrative I’d envisaged. In my quest, I stumbled across a recording by two incredible composers, Osvaldo Pugliese and Astor Piazzolla, performed live in Amsterdam. I immediately knew that this was the one.

Two giants from the tango world, Pugliese and Piazzolla, meet two titans from the classical dance world, Nunn and Trevitt, in a unique amalgamation of two of the best and most famous tango compositions,
La Yumba
(Pugliese) and
Adiós Nonino
(Piazzolla). I decided to call my new work
Yumba vs. Nonino.
It would tell the story of two composers fighting for supremacy, who would merge their genius into one extraordinary opus.

Michael Nunn represented Pugliese’s
La Yumba
, while Billy Trevitt danced the long and sweeping lines of Piazzolla’s classic. The dance style created for the piece was inspired by many disciplines, not strictly tango and not precisely ballet: a fusion in itself, like the music. It was my hope that the audience would understand and enjoy a unique and thrilling coalescence between four talented legends.