Dancing Out of Darkness

by Kristina Rhianoff

  After getting through the samba in Week 5, I then got the news from the producers that we would be dancing the paso doble in Week 6. The paso doble! I didn’t have a clue how it would work, since the whole dance revolves around the male character, who has to be a strong bullfighter type and very aggressive in his moves and facial expressions. How could I do this with John? So I decided to keep the music fairly traditional and go back to basics. I used a technique called ‘bronze level figures’ whereby I would teach him just a few steps and he had to repeat them over and over again. Then I thought it would be good to include something exciting at the beginning of the routine, a talking point. With my previous partners we had done a move where I drop to the floor and my dance partner swoops me around on the floor and then picks me up again. Obviously it was quite fast and looks exciting when two professionals are dancing it, but John couldn’t even pull me.

  We did a few rehearsals with this move and decided to keep it in the routine and then my plan was to do a lot of dancing around him. At least the ‘drag’ would take up a bit of time in the music and then he could concentrate on the basic steps I taught him. When we came to the dress rehearsal on the Friday at the BBC Studios, I could hear people giggling around us. I couldn’t work out what was so funny until they said that as he wasn’t even able to pull me, it just looked like I was lying on the floor while he was kicking me in the forehead. So I said to him he really needed to try and pull me as far as he could so I wouldn’t just sit on the same spot on the dance floor.

  Well, when we actually performed on the night the whole studio went mad! Some were laughing, some were clapping, but I think everyone appreciated John having a go at this iconic dance. Here was a man who couldn’t really pull me across the floor and instead of looking aggressive he just managed to look grumpy. When I watched the show back later, I understood why there was a standing ovation afterwards. It was just so funny and he only managed to pull me a couple of steps, bless him! But he gave it a good go and that is what the show is about.

  I have learnt now, after all my years on the show, that working with a celebrity partner is all about trust. This is my world the celebrity is coming into, my knowledge I am teaching, my choreography, my skills they have to learn. And in the past I have had celebrities who don’t want to let go and they take themselves quite seriously and it never works.

  John made people realise that Strictly isn’t just for the young, fit, good-looking types, anyone can enjoy it. I had so many fan letters from viewers who wrote to us saying things like, ‘I’ve just booked some dance lessons for my dad who is retired and he’s really enjoying it’. Older couples wrote to us saying how much we had inspired them to take part and start dancing together and there was a lady from Scotland who wrote to us, telling us she had just bought two kittens and one was really big and one was really small so she had named them John and Kristina!

  People were genuinely interested in what we were going to do next and John always said to me that the British public are very smart and clever and they will not support anyone that they don’t think deserves it. He said that he would keep doing the show all the time the public still wanted him to.

  But after the Paso Doble Week, even though we might have had the public on our side, the press started to turn. We were facing a bit of a backlash: ‘Why is the Dancing Pig still in the show?’ was the general consensus. I was getting lots of press attention and I felt quite unnerved by it all and the BBC didn’t want me talking to anyone.

  And so we kept going. Bruce Forsyth was always very nice to John and me and he opened the show one week with the words, ‘Welcome to the John and Kristina Show!’ which I don’t think the producers liked but it was nice to think he was on our side.

  We danced the foxtrot in Week 7, Week 8 was the cha-cha-cha and Week 9 was the American smooth. This dance required a lift, a little cradle lift in a baby-doll position, and I remember Craig Revel Horwood commenting that John wasn’t that bad! Craig said he could actually see some improvement. It tends to happen like that: Week 5 and Week 6 are a pivotal point for the celebrities because if they can make it that far then they tend to feel a lot less nervous about being on the dance floor and start to embrace it.

  Unfortunately, while we were still being kept in the show by the public there were a number of dancers who were getting better scores than us who were being voted off and that made me feel really uncomfortable. I do know that some of the professional dancers were saying nasty things behind my back and that the celebrities became very open about how they felt about John and me still being on the show.

  I did get quite defensive as I didn’t understand how this was our fault – I was just doing a job with John and if people wanted to keep on voting for us then who was I to stop it? It was very intimidating, though, and because I was the new girl on the show, I was still desperate to fit in. Apart from Brian I didn’t have any proper friends there and he was busy focusing on his dance partner, singer Heather Small, so we didn’t really get to see each other.

  I did feel like an outcast at several points. The only person I could talk to was my mum but it was hard to explain to her what was going on in this British TV show. It was in such a different world so it was very hard to understand.

  John was definitely not enjoying it any more. He started saying to me, ‘The fun is over, it’s all becoming a little bit too aggressive and not nice for the both of us.’

  We got to the week before the quarter-finals and our next dance was the salsa. I started putting a routine together and one afternoon, I sensed a real change in the atmosphere. There was no laughing or joking and when we took a break, John told me he was finding it difficult and struggling to see the fun side – especially as the media had started hounding his family. I remember being followed home by a paparazzo on a motorbike one evening and it was quite petrifying. As soon as I got home I had to call my mum – I couldn’t believe quite why I was interesting enough for him to be following me. Of course it meant that the paps all knew where I lived and so I started finding more and more of them outside the flat waiting for me.

  The day after one of our early rehearsals for the salsa I left John with a feeling in my gut. I went to bed with that feeling and I couldn’t shake it off. We had arranged to meet the following morning bright and early for rehearsals but when I woke up at 7am, I already had a text message from him waiting for me.

  It said: ‘Kristina, I have been up all night. I’m really, really sorry but I feel like the right decision would be for me to step down and finish the show. The joke has gone a little bit too far. But before I say any of that to anybody I need to know that you are OK with this decision as I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want to hurt your career and it is very important to me that you are OK with this decision.’

  The funny thing was I wasn’t surprised. I knew something like this was brewing so I texted him back straight away: ‘John, I completely understand. I will support you no matter what. We are a team and we’ve been a good team and I don’t want you to be unhappy. We have created great numbers that will live in Strictly history and so I completely support you and I will be there for you.’

  I was touched that he was concerned about my feelings but there was a part of me that thought this was as good a time as any to stop. It was nearly the quarter-finals and if we did make it through, we would have to learn two dances a week. That would be extremely hard because we could barely do one dance a week and it wouldn’t be fun any more if he was feeling like this; he wouldn’t be happy. The press had completely blamed him the past Saturday night for the public voting-off of the English actress Cherie Lunghi and her partner James Jordan, who were good dancers. No one seemed happy that we were still in the competition and I understood that John was bearing the brunt of the backlash. He told me he was going to call the producers and arrange a press conference that day.

  ‘The craziest thing is, Kristina, I don’t want to win the show, I don’t want to be in the final,’ he told me.
r />   I am sure I had seen that the bookmakers had shortened the odds that we might win the show and for John that very real possibility was quite scary. ‘The joke has gone too far,’ he said. ‘I understand that the public want to prove they have the power over the judges on voting but enough is enough.’

  After I had received those text messages and John had spoken to the BBC about the press conference I remember turning on the BBC News and I could not believe what I was seeing. There was video footage of John dragging me across the floor in our paso doble routine being shown with the caption, ‘Breaking News: John Sergeant quits Strictly Come Dancing’. Every fifteen minutes or so it was being broadcast and I couldn’t believe it – it was like the Prime Minister had resigned or something.

  It was crazy to see myself under that ‘Breaking News’ slogan and I just couldn’t understand why people thought it was such a big deal that John had left the show. But I suppose it just showed how much of a big deal it was – there were millions of people voting for him and he needed to explain his decision.

  The press conference was quite surreal. There were probably about thirty journalists there, including Jeremy Paxman, an old friend of John’s, asking lots of questions. But John’s statement was very concise:

  If the joke wears thin, if in fact people take it very seriously and if people really are getting so wound up that it’s very difficult to carry off the joke then I think it’s time to go. It’s when you decide when you leave a party, and the time to leave a party is before the fight starts. I think that’s what happened on this occasion.

  I had been instructed not to talk to the press by the BBC so I was just sitting there but it was important to me that I was there so it didn’t look like John was doing this all by himself. And I didn’t want people to speculate that I was angry about it. One journalist did ask me what I felt about it. I said that I supported John and I knew it was the right decision for him to make. There were lots of articles written after his press conference that were pretty horrible – ‘Selfish John lets Kristina down’ was the main vibe. But they had got it all wrong. If anything, John helped me to have a really good experience on my very first show. It was challenging to choreograph dance routines for a sixty-four-year-old journalist who couldn’t dance and I felt like I had done a really good job with him.

  It was agreed that we would dance our goodbye dance that following Saturday and so we danced the waltz from Week 1 again. I do remember crying afterwards. It was very sad and we were such a good team and I had had such a lovely time with him. And yes, I did feel like he was a father figure to me and he really took me under his wing.

  And do you know what the funniest thing is? If we had ever been in the bottom two then the judges would have booted us off and that would have been that. But we never were in a dance-off, not once – the public saved us every time.

  I suppose to some extent I blamed the press: they were all with us at the beginning and then they turned against us and I felt angry because I didn’t see why they had to make this man feel so embarrassed about dancing with me on a Saturday night. And they weren’t satisfied with his reasons for quitting the show either. They wanted to write stories that speculated ‘the real reason John quit Strictly!’

  I wasn’t talking to the press as I wasn’t allowed to do so and John made it clear he wouldn’t be doing any more interviews after his press conference, so where else did the press turn to get a story? My family. I suddenly started getting phone calls from the press, telling me that they had spoken to my ex-boyfriend, or they had spoken to my dad or they had spoken to an old friend… it was horrific. All of a sudden they were trying to get a quote from anyone I knew. I felt completely cornered as I was forbidden to talk to them by the BBC and yet on the other hand I had the phone ringing off the hook every ten minutes asking me to talk (and I still don’t know how they got my number). I started not answering the telephone and then I would get messages that became quite aggressive. They would say things like, ‘We have this angle on you from your old boyfriend and if you don’t talk to us, we will print this or we will print that about you.’

  Where had all this come from? It felt completely horrendous – I was sitting all alone in my flat, crying my eyes out and I couldn’t understand why this was happening to me. I didn’t want to be threatened, I didn’t want my private life all over the papers – for goodness’ sake, who would care about that? It was such a horrible, horrible feeling.

  So I spoke to John as I just didn’t know what to do. He told me to try and ignore it and that it would eventually blow over but it might be a bit rocky for the next few weeks. But then when I saw an article in a newspaper with a quote in it from my dad I was beyond hurt. I didn’t even speak to him that often – we had tried to patch things up when I was in America and yes, I suppose you could say we now had an amicable relationship but I was never talking to him on a daily basis. He had called my mum to ask what was happening with me and she had told him that I was really upset as my partner had had to stop doing the show for several reasons and how sad I was because of all the press attention I was getting. That is all my dad knew: he only ever knew what my mum had just told him, I never talked directly to him.

  It was so hurtful to see that my father had spoken to the press. When I rang him, he told me that he didn’t mean any harm by it and that the journalists had spoken to him and told him how much they adored me; how well I had done in teaching one of Britain’s national treasures to dance. And so naturally my dad (who is of course still proud of me and what I have done) said, ‘Yes, she is unhappy about not dancing any more.’ They made up the rest of the quote from him and used it in the story.

  I know how desperate they must have been to get a story, but I just couldn’t understand it. When the News Of The World called me I actually told them, ‘This is what happened: John was an extremely nice person to work with, I knew he wasn’t happy any more’, and I told them about the text I got and how I was supportive of his decision. So that is what I said. Then on the Sunday I read something entirely different: ‘Exclusive!’ it said, ‘Kristina opens up about John quitting Strictly!’

  And I was so naïve: I had tried to give them what they wanted, by simply telling them what had happened and then all of a sudden it was a big ‘exclusive’. And it all became so very twisted. It was a rude awakening to the power of the press and I didn’t like the fact they went to my family, too: they had tried to speak to my mum, my grandfather (who by this time was well into his seventies) and my aunt, who told me she had had a phone call from a newspaper saying they wanted to find out what sort of child I was. How was that relevant? I just don’t understand why there isn’t some kind of law that forbids all of that, why they can get away with it.

  It was at that point when I had had enough. ‘That’s it,’ I thought. ‘I’m not going back to the show if they ask me to return next year. I don’t want to go through this again and I don’t want to put my family through anything like this again.’ All the couples returned for the final show and I did a little dance with John, which was nice but didn’t feel as happy as it should have done.

  At Christmas I went back to LA and had a good think about my experience overall on the show. I said to my mum, ‘I don’t think I want to go back. It was hard dealing with the press and I don’t think I could deal with it again.’ Besides, they might not want me back on the show either!

  Being back in LA and with my mum was just what I needed. I met with a few of the producers who were working on Dancing with the Stars and they asked me to do a screen test for that show. Mum was really encouraging and wanted me to give it my best shot so I did. It was the same interview that I had done with Strictly really – I had to talk about my choreography, how I would teach, my time on Strictly and all that. And they told me they would be in touch.

  I had high hopes about something positive coming out of that as Dancing with the Stars was based in LA so I could live with my mum and I felt it would be amazing.

  In Januar
y 2009 I was invited to do the Strictly Come Dancing tour. I wasn’t going to have a celebrity dance partner but I would be doing the group numbers and also solo numbers with a professional dancer, Matthew Cutler. Brian wasn’t asked to do the tour so I danced with Matthew, who had previously won the show with singer Alesha Dixon in 2007. It was six weeks on the road and so I went back to England to do it, thinking if nothing else it was a good income for a short period of time and it was exciting to dance on my own, too. All the other dancers had known each other for years but I was still the new girl, desperate to prove that I belonged.

  During the tour I did hear back from Dancing with the Stars, which was all very positive, and they wanted me to sign a contract that basically said they wanted me on board but there would be no guarantees that I would be used on the show. It was a five-year contract and it meant I couldn’t do any other TV work – even though there were no guarantees that I would be on the show. I would be ‘on the books’ as it were. But I just didn’t want to be contracted to DWTS for five years with no guarantees so I decided to turn it down. I then made the decision to call the producers of Strictly and be totally honest and ask whether they thought they might want to use me for anything in the future. And they were really understanding and said that yes, they were interested in using me – either just for the tours or possibly on the show or maybe in another guise. So I thought, ‘OK, I definitely won’t sign the DWTS contract and when this tour is over, I’ll go back to LA, spend a bit of time with Mum and see what Strictly then offers.’