Dancing Out of Darkness

by Kristina Rhianoff

  But I just replied, ‘I think I’ll be OK!’

  I didn’t want to say I was disappointed because I certainly didn’t want to sound ungrateful. The truth is, anyone can do well if they are young or fit or strong, but it is much more difficult to put your stamp on the show if you are the opposite – and John was the opposite to all of that! Anyway, I went home that evening and googled ‘John Sergeant’. I discovered that he was a very well liked political journalist who had been hit by the female British Prime Minister with her handbag. And at that point I thought to myself, ‘You know what? I am going to try my hardest to do my best with him.’

  I was very touched that he had thought the Russian connection would be something I would be interested in, and although he didn’t try to speak any Russian to me – he only knew a few words – he knew a lot about my country. I can’t really explain but it was very comforting being around him. I think I knew from that very first meeting that he was going to be good for me as he had a nice vibe and a very protective presence. And OK, he might not be that good a dancer, but already I could see he was going to be a kind person to work with.

  So we started our first rehearsal. I remember it was a Thursday and I was told that our first dance together was going to be a waltz. I had to submit my song, which was Norah Jones’ ‘Come Away With Me’, which is still my favourite waltz music. We started to rehearse and it was clear to me very early on that he was getting out of breath quite easily and we had to keep taking breaks as his feet were getting swollen. He would have to sit and do these foot exercises that his doctor had given him. A sixty-four-year-old man, he was overweight and out of shape and I knew I needed to be careful, but we had such a nice vibe going, we were always laughing. It was like dancing with my grandad – he was so sweet and always telling jokes.

  Then the press got hold of the fact that John was taking part and dancing with me, the new Russian girl, and we spent a lot of time looking through the newspapers and laughing at the stories that had been written about us – complete polar opposites! He tried to explain his world of journalism to me and what the industry was like, and he did say he would try and help me out as much as possible with the press to protect me or raise my profile.

  ‘Every interview I do on TV or with the newspapers, I will try to bring you along, too, so you get to know this world but you get to know it with me,’ he said. It was so nice of him, I didn’t expect such kindness – something that I was later to discover was quite rare in the world of TV and media.

  He took me along to a photo shoot with one of his friends from the Daily Mail and he said I needed to be in my ballroom gown. It was the first interview I gave under John’s supervision. I had no idea what the British press was like at that time – that was yet to come – so I was still quite naïve and I didn’t know what I was doing. We were given no media training by the show and it was all so new to me. That first interview I did was nice and polite and looked fine in print and it was a positive piece.

  After that, John took me to a few radio chat shows and TV shows – we were on the BBC’s The One Show, for example. He was getting lots of interview requests but he always said he would only do it if I could go with him. I really appreciated that and he was very protective of me. I will always be grateful for that as he really cared and he really wanted to give me a glimpse into his world of journalism, but with his guidance. At the beginning you weren’t allowed to have publicists or agents; every interview was done through the BBC press office and the dancers were forbidden to give interviews or talk about the show unless it was through the BBC, who would check the questions or sit in on the interviews.

  I asked John what made him finally agree to take part in the show as they had been asking him for many years. He told me that he kept turning it down because he knew he was unfit and he wouldn’t find it very comfortable. And then he thought it was rude not to take part after being asked so often!

  ‘Kristina, I have everything I want in my life right now, I couldn’t want any more,’ he told me. ‘I’m sixty-four and I have done lots of great things and have a one-man show and am doing comedy. There isn’t anything I want from the show, I just want to have a good time and have fun. And who knows, I might learn a bit of dancing! I know I can’t dance but I don’t have anything to prove either.’

  Every year since John and I were partnered together I have asked my celebrity dance partner why they decided to take part in the show. It is something I need to know right from the beginning, and some people say it’s because they want to do well and learn a new skill and go all the way, while others want a bit of publicity and exposure – there are lots of different reasons. John’s reason was just to have a good time and it made me feel a lot less stressed about it all. Before I knew I was partnered with him I did feel a lot of pressure that my choreography had to be amazing and my routines must be entertaining for the TV audience. Not only that, they had to be routines that I would be able to teach, too. But with John, I felt the important thing was for him to have a good time. He is who he is, and so I just had to make our dances as comfortable and easy as possible for him.

  So I started putting a routine together, and it was fairly early on in our three-week preparations to learn the waltz that I realised he might be old but he had a very busy life! He had a lot of engagements and he was away on some kind of trip for one thing or another. And because he was performing his one-man shows, I had to travel with him, too – I remember visiting Cornwall for a day with him. I wanted to use every chance we got to rehearse and so I decided to use the theatre stage where he would do his show later that evening as a place to practise the waltz. But when we got to the theatre that morning it was all locked up so, while we waited for someone to come and open up, I suggested we could have a little practise outside – it was a nice warm day and we had the space. We thought nothing of it until the next day when there were pictures in the press of us dancing outside with a story that claimed John was worried about the show and trying to dance anywhere and everywhere he could to practise!

  It made me laugh at the time. I could not understand why this was a story that was in the newspapers as we were just rehearsing. What was the big deal? I stayed for his oneman show that evening and loved it. He was such a brilliant presenter and had great comic timing, too. At one point he very kindly called me up on stage and introduced me to the audience, which was sweet of him.

  So we had two weeks of training and that was when the stress really hit me. We were now in the studio rehearsing for the live show and I kept saying, ‘Oh my goodness, it is a live show, anything could happen!’

  I kept telling myself that I was being ridiculous and that I had danced in front of live audiences hundreds of times before, but the difference this time was that it was also on TV. It made everything a lot scarier. My biggest worry was that John would forget some steps as sometimes he would mix them up and I just wanted him to do well – it was such a lovely dance we had put together.

  Of course, Brian had done the show in America so he knew what it was like, but I really was the new girl. Darren Bennett and Lilia Kopylova were also on the show and I knew her from various competitions and they were very kind and nice to me, as were Matthew Cutler and Ian Waite. They all tried to be supportive and helpful and reassure me.

  You do feel quite supportive in one sense and you always wish the other Strictly couples well, but sometimes you are so focused on your celebrity, you can’t think about anyone else. I remember standing behind the curtain and I heard the presenter Bruce Forsyth call out, ‘Dancing next, John Sergeant and his dance partner, Kristina Rihanoff!’, and I just felt like my heart was going to explode. I was so petrified! But John had sensed how tense I was and so he just squeezed my hands and smiled at me. He wasn’t nervous at all! Out of all the celebrities I have worked with, and having been on the show for seven years, he was the only one who didn’t ever seem nervous. It was a comfort as it reminded me what the show was all about for him – he just wanted to have so
me fun and to have a good time. And at that moment, I knew whatever would be, would be, although it felt like a bit of a role reversal as he led me out onto the dance floor.

  I started dancing and my training kicked in as soon as I sensed him wobbling over some steps. And so I guided him and kept him going, and he did a lovely waltz as his first dance. The judges gave us OK marks but it didn’t count towards anything as it was the first week and no one was voted off. They said it was very sweet and endearing, and I was very proud of him. At the end of the day it was his world he was taking me into, in a sense. Although I was the one teaching the dancing on this dance show, he had been in front of the cameras for years and so it felt like he was guiding me. He still had to learn how to dance, however, and he did – he just took his own time. I was very patient with him and I would never, ever criticise him or raise my voice and he tried to learn as much as possible.

  Soon I started noticed changes in him, too, like his eating habits. When we first had lunch together, he would have lots of bread with his meal and a glass of wine, but then he started to drop some of the bread and I encouraged him to drop the wine, too. He started losing weight (he had lost 30 pounds by the end of the show) and he felt a lot better in himself; it also helped him not to get out of breath so much. We were spending a lot of time rehearsing, about seven or eight hours in training a day, as it did take time for him to learn a routine – I don’t think he had ever done that much physical activity in his life!

  With John I choreographed every single thing and I had to be quite clever with the routines I put together. I purposely played on the fun aspects of the dances, and in our third dance, the samba, I chose the music, ‘Papa Loves Mambo’. As it was such fun music we put a lot of playful moves into it. One of those moves was for John to dance a little bit on his own – only for sixteen beats of the music, but totally on his own – and he didn’t have a clue what to do so he ended up flinging his arms above his head. It was hilarious!

  That was the best thing about John – he was up for anything and he trusted me completely. He wasn’t afraid to do what I asked him to do, even if that meant he would look silly. And I think that was what made him so endearing to the public: they realised he was never going to be a good dancer but he was an incredible entertainer. And he was the one who taught me, on my very first series, the real purpose of the show: entertainment. That is something that a lot of dancers and most of the celebrities who take part don’t understand: it is purely an entertainment show. For me the penny dropped after a few weeks, as before then I was still in the competitive dancing frame of mind. I was coming from a world where the dance had to be of the highest quality, where the technique had to be spot-on and the precision immaculate. But John was the one who ‘got’ the show – this wasn’t a world-class dancing competition, it was an entertainment show for television.

  I knew that it was my job to make funny, great routines, as there was no one else like John in the cast that year – there were lots of good dancers but there was no one who could be funny like him. All our routines were fun and none more so than our now infamous paso doble. I think from that moment on, the show changed in its viewpoint; people had been watching it before to see the dancing; now they were watching it and seeing that dancing was fun. And John and I were definitely having fun!

  CHAPTER 16

  Dancing with John is a drag (paso doble week)!

  There is always a lot of hype over couples breaking up and others coming together on Strictly Come Dancing. It is the closeness, the physicality of dancing with someone of the opposite sex that gets people talking. And I understand that if you are new to dancing, new to this whole concept of putting yourself in someone else’s arms, it can be perceived as something sexual. But as a professional dancer, having grown up in this business for years, a close proximity to someone else is very normal. We don’t feel threatened or intimidated by it or take it as a sexual tension of any kind. That personal space line that people have is so blurred for all of us dancers because we grow up dancing so close to other people. We feel each other’s bodies and we are trained to understand body signals… It’s a non-verbal communication and as professionals, something we have been developing for years and years.

  When I first started dancing on Strictly, I didn’t think twice about it. Why would the physical closeness be perceived as strange? Why would other people find it so difficult? And with John, we had quite a father-daughter relationship so I never thought about it. The press started joking about how wonderful it must be for John, an old man, dancing with this young blonde girl and I just thought, ‘What a silly thing to say!’

  He was a sixty-four-year-old man whom I saw as a father more than anything else. But I guess I was a little naïve and he was very comfortable with it – besides, all of our dances weren’t based on any intimacy, only comedy. I did think a couple of the costumes I was given to wear were a little skimpy and it felt a little inappropriate to wear them to dance with John so I made sure they didn’t give me any two-piece dresses to wear – I was always covered a little more.

  I understood very quickly that John was very well liked and had his own fan base. I wanted to appeal to them too, and I didn’t want him to lose that support. He introduced me to a lot of his friends who were journalists and in my eyes everyone was a friend, even members of the press.

  All the experiences with the media I had at that point with John were positive and we were progressing through the show, too. We got through the second week, the third week, the fourth week… I thought to myself, ‘This is just insane!’ Of course I wanted to stay in for as long as possible but to me it was surreal as there were such good dancers on the show and we were doing entertaining and clever comedy sketches, really. But it wasn’t like we weren’t working hard: John was learning a lot and his ability definitely improved. So I said to myself, I just need to make my routines interesting, make a good impression as a professional – this job is only for four months so just enjoy it! I didn’t want to be famous; I was going back to LA in December so I always had that in the back of my mind.

  And then things started to go wrong. I began picking up a few bad vibes from the other professional dancers and I knew they were annoyed by the fact we were still in the show even though John wasn’t very good at dancing. There were decent dancers leaving the show and it became a little uncomfortable. And then the press started picking up on the same idea: that this old man who couldn’t dance was staying in a dancing show while other, better dancers were leaving. They began calling him ‘the dancing pig in Cuban heels’ in the stories they were writing about him. To me, this was just rude.

  The judges weren’t giving us any positive comments either, not that I ever expected they would. They were quite harsh but it was the rudeness I couldn’t understand. There was John, a well-respected gentleman and let’s be honest, some of the judges were of a similar age, so I thought the rude comments were just inappropriate. But then again, I was new to the show and I didn’t appreciate how it worked on TV – that someone had to be a villain, for example. In the competitive world, you don’t ever get a comment from the judges, you just receive your scores after your dance and even then it is what we call ‘closed judging’ whereby you don’t know who gave you what scores. It was all very different from TV judging.

  I knew Len Goodman from Dancing with the Stars and on TV in America but I didn’t know Arlene Phillips, Bruno Tonioli or Craig Revel Horwood. It was funny, though: the harsher the judges were to John, the more the public showed their support for him. It was the public versus the Strictly judges. And John wouldn’t ever let me say anything back to the judges. He always managed to make light of it and whenever we were interviewed by Strictly’s co-presenter Tess Daly afterwards he made a few jokes about what they had said. I am sure that is why he was so well liked with the public because they could see that he wasn’t taking any of the judges’ comments too seriously – he didn’t have anything to prove.

  The further we got into th
e competition, though, the more uncomfortable it became. John told me that the paparazzi would be camped outside their house trying to take pictures of his wife and two sons. Mary, his wife, was lovely and she never wanted that sort of attention. If you are not in the world of television it is not something you are used to or ask for and I knew she was constantly being asked by reporters, ‘What do you think of your husband dancing with a young Russian blonde?’ or ‘What do you think about him being in the competition for so long? He is so rubbish!’

  I couldn’t believe it when John told me all of this. Who would benefit from all those negative stories? I couldn’t understand why, when you had this brilliant show on TV that everyone loves, it was so important for the press to write something negative and so rude, too. And why would they want to make fun of someone like John?

  Around that time I was asked to do an interview with the Daily Mirror. It was a solo interview just about beauty tips and make-up and I have always been into health and beauty and new products so it was really exciting for me. I did it with the BBC press office sitting in on the interview and then waited for it to appear in the Sunday supplement magazine. I couldn’t quite believe it when I read the article, it made me sound so cheap and tarty. It was written in a very sarcastic way and used quotes that I never actually said! My character had never been judged before: it was always about my dancing, or my choreography or teaching. I asked John about it and he just explained that the press can be on your side one minute and then the next, completely crush you. He told me to embrace it while I was on the show but if I ever found it too hard, just quit.

  When I was teaching back in LA, I made sure everyone had a good experience with me as we got pupils through word-of-mouth. If you are difficult to work with then you are unlikely to get new students and I was always very conscious of this. But now I was slowly beginning to understand how the press worked. I was very upset for John too and I was beginning to see a little bit of sadness in him. We were about halfway through the competition and although he was still trying his hardest to learn, he wasn’t having as much fun in rehearsals: his heart simply wasn’t in it.