Anton Du Beke and Erin Boag: Away from the bright lights of the Ballroom

On my way to the theatre I am picturing the article that I don’t want to write. I don’t want any Strictly puns in the title, I don’t want to put together some terribly forgettable exposé about life behind the sequins or the stage-smiles or whatever. It’s been done.

My aim is to have them give the honest answers, instead of the ones they either feel expected to say or the ones they are used to saying. My challenge is to have them put into words something I know from experience is very difficult to describe.

If I have nothing else in common with Anton Du Beke and Erin Boag (which is probably a fair assumption), I know what it is to love to dance. I have felt the drive take place over the exhaustion when your body is tired but your mind is not satisfied and to this day I wonder how it is that I cannot jog for more than twenty minutes yet I regularly find it in me to rehearse and choreograph for three hours straight.

Du Beke calls this a state of mind. Though he is ever-charming in his nature, his answer has a sort of hard-headedness that I would expect has emerged from his years of competing, the blood, sweat and tears that it took to get him to where he is now.

“You either are it, or you’re not,” he says and I think he’s entitled to be that unforgiving. Forget the fake tan and sheer-shirt stereotypes of Strictly and remember the man in front of me is a World Class professional.

“That attitude is the same for a dancer as for a professional sportsperson. You get those people at the top of their game – the really good ones. The others probably don’t have the same commitment and drive and preparation.”

Erin is off-duty in sweatpants and without makeup and I suppose that this is the reason that I am not permitted to take photos with them backstage. If that is the case it seems a bit of a burden for any girl to bear. But then I imagine that the audience want to believe in all the glamour and magic of ballroom and that Erin has probably come to personify that.

It’s not a weight on her shoulders though, as I discover. I think she is perhaps still too enamoured by the elegance to perceive it a requirement rather than a privilege.

“I’m very lucky,” she tells me, genuinely. “I get to dress up every night and dance beautifully.”

She’s too modest to be talking of just her own dancing here and the way she alludes to an infatuation with the dance as a whole is the first inkling I have that the pair may be able to answer the question that I really came here to ask.

The second is the fact that their relationship with dance has not been corrupted by money. We all know what it is to love something and then to instantly resent it when it’s no longer a choice but a necessity, and dancing is to some extent, their day-job.

And before I know it I’m asking (begrudgingly) about those stage-smiles and how much of it is all for show, before Anton wipes away any notion of the pair adopting alter-egos for the sake of a good performance.

“This is what we do and we absolutely enjoy it,” he says. “You can’t not be yourself when people have come to see you.”

And Erin agrees, “what you see onstage is what we are.”

It’s true, too. Having watched from the audience I don’t see fakery. The showmanship is all just bringing to life what they have told me prior to the curtain rising.

And rather unexpectedly I found myself falling for the classic charm of ballroom and getting lost in all its elegance, so I’m not surprised when Erin recounts to me how the audience often think they see perfection.

“What people see and what we feel is often totally different though,” she adds.

“Not often,” Anton chips in, “always!” And while she digs her heels in for a moment eventually Erin comes around.

“Perfection is an unattainable goal,” Anton tells me, and just as I think it’s quite a forgettable cliché for him to call upon he adds, quite expertly, “as it should be.”

And I find the moment handed to me where I could ask two of the country’s best if they could ever adequately describe in words the moment it all comes together – when the stress and aches and pains and all the background noise fades behind the perfect symmetry of dancer, choreography and music.

“It’s like flying, really,” Anton says, and my heart sinks with the weight of the answer I didn’t want to hear.

And perhaps he sensed my disappointment because he started to search for a truer reflection, one I knew was hard to put into words for anyone who'd not known the feeling for themselves and one that Erin was equally struggling to express.

“It’s a weightless feeling of complete... –ness." he went on to say. "It’s immaculate.”

And those were the right words. I knew because all three of us felt a sense of relief like the one when you finally remember the name of that person that you’ve been scouring the edges of your memory for hours to recall – suddenly, it all fits.

A merry first memory, nearly eight decades old

December 2010

Seventy-eight-year-old Joan Jackson chortles at the size of the camera phone taking her picture.

As she sits hand-in-hand with her husband of fifty-three years, Peter, while the couple holiday in Bournemouth, she reflects on how much things have changed in their lifetime.

Her three-year-old great-granddaughter draws doodles on the computer, while Joan – an ex-Book Keeper – remembers the very first calculators, the ones on wheels.

But her earliest memory is not so incomparable to childhood today. It is of her first Christmas at school when Santa paid a visit. 

Joan was just five years old and in a year group of around thirty boys and girls.

She recalls their anticipation on the morning of his arrival in Albury, near Birmingham. "We all knew he was coming, we were so excited." 

"In assembly," she explains "our headmistress told us to watch for him while she popped outside. Of course, while she was gone, Father Christmas appeared!”

She smiles at her own innocence, something she remembers fondly about her own children and their children in the many Christmases that have passed since that one.

"We ran up to the headmistress afterwards gushing about Father Christmas and how she'd missed him by just a minute!" she laughs.

Joan doesn't remember the gift she was given on that morning back in 1932, but she recalls that it would accompany the lone orange she was so happy to receive in her stocking Christmas morning.

She shakes her head nostaligically.

Times have changed – and so have stockings - but children at Christmas never will.

Three minutes with Jeremy Vine

First year Journalism student Victoria Hutton on combining one of her first assignments with one of the biggest names in the business…


The brief is to get an interview with a journalist whose career we aspire to emulate. Scribbled on my page of notes, seconds after the task has been set, is this word – Vine. It was going to take a lot of persistence but I thought there was a chance I might pull this off - what I didn’t foresee was getting a reply from the man himself. We set a date for a few mornings later and it's decided I'll call at 10.40.

At 10.39 I dial –  as if I'm going to keep Jeremy Vine waiting! He picks up the phone, expecting me, and says he’s happy to help but we have to make it quick. This is my inauguration into the real world of Journalism; hours of contacting the right people, hours of prep for just a ten minute phone-call and it all comes down to a matter of seconds.

Jeremy was three years older than I am now when he secured an internship with the BBC as a News trainee in 1987. He went on to report the Today programme and present Newsnight, while his self-titled music and current affairs programme on Radio 2 won him the Speech Broadcaster of the Year award in 2005. He is a self-professed ‘news junkie,' saying “I think it’s a given in my job. I love news; I’ve worked in news all my life.”

Unsurprisingly, given his body of work, Vine says his particular interest lies in Politics. “I see it as a sort of human drama at Westminster. It’s fascinating to see how power arranges itself.” Meanwhile, I have to admit that it is a subject I sometimes struggle to get my head around. But as he tells me his fascination only developed while he was studying English at Durham University, I am reassured that all hope is not lost.


Offering sound advice from the top of the career ladder, he says, “Don’t take no for an answer, get outside the M25 and take an interest in people - listen to people.”

I have to ask him if he's faced the same financial struggle as all journalists. I've wondered before now if there is an element of Hollywood within the Media world, where a select few make the big bucks and the rest are working just to scrape by. But he chooses not to comment on his wage and I leave it at that, whilst making a mental note to make better use of his advice about not taking no for an answer next time.

Time ticks on and despite the rush, I still need to know one thing; if he has ever faced the same scepticism that I have already, with people so convinced by the age-old stigma surrounding journalists that they can't help but pass a snide look or comment on hearing that I'm training to become one.  “I think BBC journalists have a good reputation.” he replies. “Attitudes towards journalists, in my experience, are largely positive.” A simple statement, but that, coming from Jeremy Vine, is reassurance enough.


At 10.42 I put down the phone feeling a little bit wiser. My head spins, trying to take in the significance of what has just happened in the last 200 seconds - I've just hung up on a household name and a man whose career I frankly cannot fault.

One cup of tea (and a few extra sugars) later, I can reflect. And I can see there are three distinct lessons learned from this experience:


The first - that there are ways to escape the social stereotypes of journalists. So I'll never lose another night's sleep over that.

The second - that it would do me good, in the future, to remember how much it meant when someone like Jeremy Vine gave someone like myself even two-hundred seconds of their time.

And, critically, the third - that I will never, ever again, forget to ask if it'd be better to call back later.