All Balls and Glitter (34 page)

The boys were an absolute dream to work with, generous and willing to try fresh and interesting things. It was a hard slog in the rehearsal room, as neither of them had had any tango experience, let alone ballroom training, so we were forced to start from scratch and then embellish it all at the end.

We had a very limited time to rehearse, too, as I was also busy with my second production for the Watermill Theatre,
Martin Guerre
. The Ballet Boyz and I rehearsed every Saturday for about five weeks, and then did a major overhaul of our creation as opening night drew near.

The piece itself required a daunting amount of stamina and discipline. It crossed my mind on more than one occasion that I
had undertaken something I wasn’t sure I could pull off. That was a big deal for me, as I have a high regard and respect for the boys’ work and I didn’t want to let them down.

We all imagined the critics would pan it, but we knew in our hearts that the audience would take it the right way and like it. Somehow, we got it on … and it was a triumph. As well as playing at the Royal Festival Hall,
Yumba vs. Nonino
went on to be showcased at the Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells to great acclaim. I’ve never been as proud as when I saw those guys up there, absolutely nailing the routine from beginning to end. I loved working with them and I know we will continue to create together in the future.

Martin Guerre
was another satisfying moment that summer. It was odd going back to a show that had played a role in my early career. Eleven years after I’d worked under Bob Avian on the original West End production, I returned to the musical to direct and choreograph it for the Watermill Theatre.

I took the decision to pare it right down. I stripped away everything that was unnecessary, and turned it into a chamber opera. The story is very complicated because it’s based on mistaken identity, but I made it as simple as I could. I also remembered my discussion with Shirley MacLaine in the stairwell at the Prince Edward Theatre and tackled the thorny issue of the subtext. I had to make it clear that the two leads were close friends who really did love one another, but not in a sexual fashion; rather in a male-bonded way. I worked with the actors to communicate the subtleties and intensity of that relationship: they would lay their lives down for each other, and we had to convey that fire.

The Watermill seats only around 200 people, so it’s fairly intimate, and the audience felt that they were part of the story. My restaging worked really well and, for the first time,
Martin Guerre
garnered rave reviews.

Clive Davis of
The
Times
, for instance, wrote: ‘Small is beautiful, and in this revised, chamber version of the ill-starred
Boublil and Schönberg melodrama, you catch an authentic whiff of a cramped, grubby and culturally claustrophobic sixteenth-century village.’

The
Daily
Telegraph
’s Dominic Cavendish, meanwhile, announced it was ‘as good a showing as the work will ever get’. You can’t ask for more than that.

All this time, I was juggling my work balls, so to speak, with balls of an altogether different nature. Despite my dating disasters in New Zealand, I was determined to continue my quest for love. My sister Diane came over for a visit, and she and I went out on the prowl one night. Bingo! I hooked up with a hunk in a bar in Soho, and he became the first guy I dated seriously after Lloyd.

He was very nice – but, I discovered, not very faithful. It seemed he had a boyfriend already, so that fling didn’t work out.

Not long after that, I encountered thirty-year-old ‘Little Big Dick’ (short man, sizeable package). We met at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party, through my good pals David and Michelle. He was a really genuine, honest and loving man. I felt very lucky to have met him.

We went on a marvellous trip to Berlin together and our affair lasted for about four months. However, I was only just beginning to stretch my wings in my newly single life, and I discovered that I wasn’t quite ready for another intense, full-on relationship. It was such a shame as we got on like a house on fire. He really made me laugh and had a glorious sense of humour, but the timing wasn’t right.

Instead, I turned my attention to assessing men in rhinestone-studded suits, as a judge on
The World’s Greatest Elvis
, a one-off talent competition to find the best Elvis impersonator from across the globe.

Elvis used his body in dance all the time, and choreographers often use his unique gestures in certain steps, so my West End background again provided the perfect foundation from which to evaluate the performers. In fact, I had recently choreographed
a play called
Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis
, which had starred Maureen Lipman and included an Elvis impersonator played by Paul Hyu (with whom, oddly enough, I’d been in
Miss Saigon
a million years ago), so I’d had to study Elvis’s moves in close detail and had become intimately aware of all his idiosyncrasies. The BBC were aware of the production and had therefore asked me to adjudicate the show – alongside my old ‘pudding pal’ Suzi Quatro, who was appraising the vocals, and Joe Esposito, a close friend of Elvis, who had actually been the one to find him dead, and who was there as an expert on the King’s personality and the different eras of his act.

I so enjoyed sharing with Suzi my memory of the time I had made her dessert when I was an apprentice chef in Ballarat. She was incredibly down to earth. She would lean over to me and say, ‘Craig, I can’t wait to get out of these leathers!’ Elvis truly was her idol; on his comeback tour in the sixties, he had worn the black leather and gone for the heavy rock sound, and that was what had inspired her. I loved that after filming she would go home and put on her fleecy, teddy-bear pyjamas, which she endearingly told me were what she wore in bed.

This might sound obvious, but
The World’s Greatest Elvis
was the weirdest show with respect to the sheer amount of Elvises on set, all looking the same. Each one had been handpicked to represent their country, so there was a Japanese Elvis, a Thai Elvis and a Brazilian Elvis, among others. It was all very peculiar.

Before the competition started, I asked the creative team what was expected of me. I was told to be honest – because we were, after all, talking about a legend. If you are going to be named as the world’s greatest impersonator of the world’s most exalted star, then you should earn the title and be phenomenal.

For me, there was one contestant who looked nothing like Elvis, sounded nothing like Elvis and moved nothing like Elvis. In fact, I didn’t know why he was even up there – so I told him that. He was furious and stormed backstage in tears.

At the interval, I was taken aside and told, ‘We’re just going to re-record one of your comments.’

I leaned across to Suzi Quatro and whispered, ‘What do you think about him?’

She murmured back, ‘I agree. He’s nothing like him.’

Nonetheless, I had to do a re-take and replace my original comments with less offensive ones. I suppose I was being a little harsh on the poor guy. It was his entire career at stake.

What I found strange, though, was that he was wearing the GI outfit – and, in my opinion, looked more like Judy Garland than the King of Rock and Roll!

O
n 6 October 2007, fourteen nervous celebrities squared their shoulders, pasted on a grin and swept grandly (or so they hoped) on to the dance floor of
Strictly Come Dancing
for its fifth season.

As usual, the other judges and I had had to negotiate the tricky process of meeting the fresh crop of contestants for the first time. As the in-house ‘villains’, it’s more difficult than you might think. We are never formally introduced to the celebs; instead, before the series starts, we are handed a press pack, with brief biographies of them all. We know as much as the media do and no more. Personally, I think it would be nicer if we had a meet and greet, like I would with a new theatre company.

I generally encounter the celebrities for the first time as I walk past them in a corridor. I always make an effort to say, ‘Hi, my name’s Craig.’

They usually respond, ‘Yes, I know who you are,’ very warily.

Occasionally, we judges might run into our new colleagues in make-up, but once they’re done up in their cha-cha outfits with sparkly faces, it’s often hard to tell who some of them are. If our paths haven’t crossed in the make-up room or in the corridors, then the first time we see them is when they walk down the stairs on to the dance floor.

Only a week after the new series started, Stephanie Beacham was walking back up that staircase and out of the competition.
She gave a masterclass in how to go out gracefully when she became the first female celebrity to leave the contest. She made everyone smile because she said, ‘Thank God! I can’t thank everybody enough for voting me out.’

It was absolutely brilliant and had all of us in stitches. She was fantastic backstage because she played up to the Hollywood superstar role, a real diva. Underneath the airy grace, I suspect she may have been quite hurt that she’d been eliminated so early, because she was in fact a very good dancer and she had a lot more to offer, but that’s the way it goes on
Strictly
.

Some of the decisions – both the public’s and my fellow judges’ – can be really annoying. Any irritation I express on the show in that regard is always genuine. At times, I think that we judges approach our marking from such disparate starting points that I almost can’t see the point in us scoring. I watch these high marks appear for what I consider to be substandard performances, and I just think, ‘That’s crazy.’

In the quarter-final of that season, for example, when Matt Di Angelo forgot the routine entirely and gave up halfway through to sit on the stairs, Len and Bruno both gave him an eight, which was ridiculously excessive. As I said on the night, the first part of the dance wasn’t particularly good and the fact that he just stopped and sat down was appalling. His fear of failure got to him. Matt’s problem was that he judged himself from the outside, rather than experiencing the movement from the inside, so he was not really in the performance.

It’s what I call a Shirley moment: having an out-of-body experience, where you leave your physical self and watch yourself externally. I named them after Shirley MacLaine because in her book,
Out on a Limb
, she claims she’s had out-of-body episodes and describes them. Actors suffer them all the time. That’s when they stop looking natural and look like they’re acting. I handed Matt a four for his efforts – and even that seems generous.

I tend to score low and Len tends to grade high, so it’s always a
bone of contention between us. Bruno is too generous, whereas Arlene can be too harsh, marking a contestant down for a small thing. Overall, I think I’m the fairest – but then, I would say that.

As each series develops, you grow used to certain ways of scoring – for instance, our starting points in series five were much higher than they’d ever been before. The season was an interesting one because the dancing was of a much higher standard. Every year, the talent has improved, so there is less for me to be critical about. I’m not going to say it’s bad if it isn’t.

Nevertheless, I provoked a lot of complaints that year. People wrote, ‘How can you be so opinionated? How dare you tell us who to vote for?’ But I don’t mind who they vote for – it’s their money. It’s my job to give them a professional opinion so they can make informed choices.

Actors and actresses are usually the ones who take the criticism to heart the most. That’s because they are already sensitive – and they’re used to having a character to hide behind. Letitia Dean, whom I adore, was quite upset with some of the comments she received in feedback and found it quite hard going. The two of us had got off to an uneasy start as it was, because some shared history initially lodged itself in the way.

Three years before her appearance on
Strictly
in 2007, Letitia went through a well-publicized split from her husband, Jason Pethers. My assistant, Heather, is now with him, so this was a sensitive issue between us. Letitia and Jason had been apart for three years, and Heather had been with him for two years. Typically, however, when the papers got hold of the connection after Letitia was announced as a contestant on the show, they made the whole thing sound like it had just happened and she was miserable because of it. The coverage hurt her, even though she had moved on.

She and I went through three very difficult weeks. The situation was too close to home. I was in a position to judge her, while my assistant, with whom I had worked for seven years, was in love with
her ex-husband. The episode put a strain on Heather and Jason’s relationship as well, because every time he went out in public, he was papped. Suddenly, they were in the papers every day.

The stories in the press created an understandable confidence issue for Letitia. She had got over the break-up, yet the media ‘exposé’ brought it all back. I felt roped into the scenario because I guessed she was always worried about what was going to come out of my mouth on the judging panel and, possibly, she may have thought that I had something against her, which wasn’t true at all. Naturally, I would never bring anyone else’s private life or mine into comment on the show. That would be completely unprofessional, not to mention rather ludicrous.

For almost a month, there was a slight atmosphere between us. Finally, we got together in the BBC bar one night and said, ‘Right, we’re going to talk about this.’

So we did, and I’m glad we had that chat because it completely cleared the air. We’ve been on the
SCD
tour together since, so thank goodness we’re now great friends. Tish is loads of fun at a party. There’s a girl who knows how to let her hair down!

Another fabulous contestant that season was the beautiful Kelly Brook. I knew Kelly already by the time she appeared on
Strictly
, through her boyfriend Billy Zane and the ill-fated
Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks
. During the West End show, she and I used to sit in the auditorium together and watch Billy on stage. Conversely, during Kelly’s run on
SCD
, Billy was on set every day. He was a wonderful support to her and I did become very fond of him again.