Lana was very supportive, it was great to have her on our side and she was always very kind and friendly to me. She would come and watch us rehearse and I naturally gravitated towards her and I found her presence really comforting. She was so encouraging and even the following year, when I did the show with Simon Webbe, she would text me to say how well she thought I was doing on the show.
When the training with Ben began, I wanted to know a bit more about him – especially as I really didn’t have a clue about rugby. I think it helps to understand where your partner is coming from and then I tell them a bit about my background, too. Otherwise you are just strangers and when you are spending so much time together, day in and day out, it’s a good way to break the ice. After telling me a little bit about his rugby career, Ben told me a story that completely shocked me; it took all my willpower not to cry. It was the story of his dad, who had been killed trying to protect someone who was being bullied by two other people. Ben had started up a charity, The Ben Cohen StandUpFoundation Inc., in honour of his father.
And then I told him about my charity work and I said it is something I rarely get to talk about it as it is something the press are rarely interested in. It gets brushed aside as they are keener to get a juicy story about my personal life. We both found it fascinating that the press are always so keen to get the nasty things reported, the trivial things, but when it comes down to actually writing something positive and really important – and spreading awareness about a charity – no one can be bothered, it seems.
In Russia, helping people is a big part of our culture. When you grow up struggling and living in such a harsh economic climate, neighbours, friends, family – we all try and help each other as much as we can. It really is quite a sympathetic country and there were always lots of charities and plenty of opportunities to help people. I always wanted to do more charity work in my relationship with Joe – I was always trying to encourage him to do stuff as he would have boys who looked up to him and I had young girls who would want to learn a few dance moves. As a couple I thought we could benefit lots of people, but it never really came about. So speaking to Ben about his charity work was really interesting. I learned so much. He talked about all these fundraising events he had organised and how they worked and I thought to myself, ‘I could help, I could do one of those for my foundation.’
Ben and I worked for ten weeks together on the show and during those weeks I went to one of his fundraising nights, an annual event he holds every October. I heard all about their anti-bullying campaigns and the work they do and I was happy to help by putting some dance lessons with myself up for auction.
I began to get very excited about what I could then achieve with my own fundraising events and working with Ben and seeing his drive for his charity really gave me a focus in my life. However a relationship ends – however amicably you break up – you still feel like a failure for not making it work. So seeing someone like Ben working so passionately on his foundation was very motivational and it did help me readjust my priorities: I wanted to concentrate on the important things like helping a charity that meant a lot to me.
Not only did Ben help give me an enthusiasm for charity work but, being an athlete himself, he was also able to give me an insight into the mind of a retired sportsman. Ben was a retired rugby player and he said that he understood what it must be like for Joe, a retired boxer, to come from a strict, rigid regime to doing nothing. It would have been a struggle for him and nothing would have been able to replace the adrenaline rush of competing. I know there are a lot of stories of retired sportsmen who go down the road of depression or alcoholism because they can’t find anything to replace the ‘high’ they had when they were competing. Ben is a rare example of someone who has made the transition from being a successful sportsman to public figure and spokesperson for his charity, and he helped me understand how it must have felt for Joe.
Rehearsing with Ben was like a form of therapy session for me. I felt safe talking to him about my private life and how I felt – I knew nothing would get leaked out and he was a good listener, too. We were eliminated the week before the quarter-finals but being with someone like Ben, who was always so positive and able to set my mind back on track and teach me so much about charity work, was brilliant. I could not have asked for a better dance partner in that respect. On the other hand, I had someone who had never danced before in his life!
I asked him about why he wanted to do the show in our very first session, as I do with all my celebrities, and he just said it was because he wanted to raise the profile of his charity. Now that was such a heartfelt reason, such an honourable answer, that I felt an enormous amount of pressure to make him look good on the dance floor. He wasn’t just looking for the next job, this was important to him and his father’s legacy. Here was a big rugby player and dancing couldn’t be further from his normal life, and I was responsible for trying to make him look good!
The cha-cha-cha was our first dance and he learned the steps really quickly, which was brilliant, and I felt a little bit of pressure taken off. OK, he was still a novice but he was picking up the right steps: so far, so good. Then I had to put the first few sequences to music and I realised something fairly critical about his dancing potential: he is half-deaf. In fact, over fifty per cent deaf, I think, so he can’t hear the music fully, only the bass and not the melody. Not being able to hear the music is probably the worst situation you can be in as you can have the best routine in the world but the first thing the judges look at is the musicality and your ability to dance your steps to the rhythm. It is the same thing you are judged on whether you are on TV dance shows or in professional competitions, it’s the first criteria that the judges look at – musicality and rhythm. So I thought, ‘What on earth am I going to do? How am I going to get this big rugby player and lead him around the floor?’
He would have to follow my lead, there was no way round it, otherwise he wouldn’t know what to do. Here was a big, strong former rugby player and we had to learn by me moving his frame around the dance floor. My arms and neck were in a lot of pain and people started asking me if I was doing some sort of weight-lifting regime as my arms had beefed up.
‘No,’ I said, ‘just dancing with Ben!’
We didn’t do too badly those first two weeks rehearsing the cha-cha-cha. He had learnt to follow my lead and I would signal to him with a hand-squeeze or something if he was getting ahead of the beat. And then the producers told me that we were opening the show on Saturday night! So we went on the dance floor and I just remember glancing over at him and he looked absolutely petrified.
‘Please, please, smile,’ I whispered to him.
And then a producer ran over to the side of the stage and tried to signal to him to just try and smile – that is all they wanted!
He did OK in the end but he was a little stiff and because he was then trying to smile he got ahead of himself a bit and I had to squeeze his hand so hard to try and slow him down! But he was ripped to shreds by the judges for being so ahead of the music. And I was so protective – I did remind all the judges that for someone who is half-deaf he wasn’t that bad and to please give him some credit!
On the Monday when we met again for rehearsals we were set to learn the waltz but I don’t think we actually got round to dancing at all as it was a bit of a therapy session for us both. He had found it hard being mocked by the judges and he didn’t want to be made fun of. Once a rugby player and the best in his field, he was now in unknown territory and struggling. But I knew where he was coming from as I had been through it all with other guys on the show. I think it is very hard for men who come from a background of being really good at something to find they are not picking up a new skill as quickly as they might have wanted. Ben had come to raise awareness for his charity and if he was going to be booted off early then it meant I had failed him and not done my job properly. I needed to build up his confidence and belief in himself and after six years of being on the show, I felt I h
ad become good at motivating other people – even if I wasn’t always quite so good at motivating myself.
I had read a lot of sports psychology books and was fascinated by many of the motivational speakers, like Anthony Robbins. When I first moved to America and started to learn a bit of English, I was introduced to the tapes. Even during some of my relationship break-ups, I went back to his theories about being positive. When you are on the show you realise how much your celebrity relies on you and they put everything – all their faith and trust – in you. Of course they go home to their families and they have wives or girlfriends or mums and dads to talk to, but in that moment, it is just you and them in that situation together on the dance floor and you are the only two people who understand what is happening.
Of course at the end of the day it is just an entertainment show but you still don’t want to fail. It is a fear of failure, a fear of not coming across well or a fear of letting yourself down that most contestants have to deal with. And I think with men, especially sportsmen, it hits them hardest: they are used to being the best of the best and to hear any form of criticism is quite damaging and they don’t know what to do with it. So on the Monday morning after the live show they unload on you and you hear all their fears and then they question whether they should have agreed to be on the show and how vulnerable they feel. Well, apart from John Sergeant, who just wanted to have fun – he did things his own way!
On the Monday when I met Ben after the first week I could just tell by his face that fear and doubt had completely taken over, so we forgot about dancing that day and just talked through everything.
‘Of course you will feel emotional, you will be scared that the public won’t like you and won’t vote for you, but you mustn’t give in to that fear,’ I told him. ‘You’re obviously not a person who gives up as it wouldn’t make you the rugby player that you are, you just have to give yourself a chance to go out there and prove you can do this. Both fear and faith are imaginary things, you just have to decide what you are going to choose to believe in.’
Thankfully, sportsmen can be good at taking coaching and I think I helped him believe that he did have it in him after all. From that point onwards, I think our training did improve. And I reminded him he was a novice and no one expected him to have an amazing technique right away. He was still learning and if anything, the audience love to get behind the underdog and love the idea that you are on, for want of a better word, a journey.
Ben took everything I said on board and stripped of his insecurities, he wasn’t afraid to try things I asked him to do. Mentally he was better prepared and he trusted me and was focused on learning. As I have said before, by about Week 5 those who are still in the competition really begin to improve and that was the same with Ben. He really flourished and we lasted ten weeks on the show – not bad going for someone who couldn’t hear the music!
I could not have asked for a better partner and when we were eliminated I was really upset. I was dreading this point; now I would have all this time to myself and be alone. As a workaholic, it was the worst feeling in the world. But dancing with Ben on the show and listening to him about his charity work was just what I needed and I was grateful to him for giving me a new focus.
As it was mid-November by then I asked my mum to come over and keep me company, and then we could spend Christmas and New Year together. So she did and now I had a little time off from the show, I decided that this might be the ideal time to try some therapy. It was something I had been thinking about for a while and in the end I found a life-coach to talk to. My very first session with her was an eye-opener: she couldn’t believe that after all the things I had been through in my life I hadn’t had any sort of therapy before. What she started to tell me made sense: she said I had been building up all this unhappiness inside me for so long that any little problem that comes into my life now seems so big I don’t feel I can deal with it. In reality, those problems aren’t that big or bad, but on top of all the sadness and past unhappiness, I was just adding to my overall baggage.
Working with the life-coach and having my mum around was really good for me and I was beginning to feel a lot more positive about life. I wasn’t ready to start dating just yet, even though I had been asked out a couple of times. It wasn’t that I still had feelings for Joe – I just didn’t feel ready to see anyone. Mum was doing her best to persuade me to go on a date but I tried to explain that it was just a waste of their time and mine. I didn’t want to sit down and make small talk or chat about Strictly; I just wanted to feel better emotionally.
Mum and I decided to spend Christmas and New Year travelling around Europe. It was a real treat for her as she had never been to Europe before. So we went to Spain for Christmas and New Year and then we went to Paris for four days to celebrate her birthday. I had travelled a lot through work or with a boyfriend so it was lovely to go to all these places with my mum and she absolutely loved it.
It was very relaxed and we could do just what we wanted. If I felt like crying, I could cry in front of her and we would talk about things. So as well as being a wonderful holiday for her, it was great therapy for me, too. I was slowly starting to accept who I was and I felt in a good place. I had the Strictly tour in January and February, which meant I would be busy again and when we returned to the UK in a sense I felt quite healed. Mum went back home and I went on tour.
I felt ready to stop grieving over past relationships – now I could just concentrate on being happy again.
CHAPTER 23
Charity highs
The 2014 Strictly tour was a success and as soon as it finished, I decided to start putting together my very first fundraising event for dotcomcf.org. Ben Cohen was very much on board and was a great help. He gave me all sorts of advice and information and put me in touch with people who could offer support. When I first got going, I called the chief executive and founder Sharon Evans about my ideas and said that we needed to put the charity on the radar by hosting a big event and to get the press on board. I started calling on all the contacts I knew and I think people were initially quite surprised about my involvement with the charity. I do it without wanting recognition and I do it because I believe in it: it’s that simple.
And people did genuinely want to be of assistance as I never ask for help and for the first time in seven years I was asking! But I do have a lot of friends over here, people who are truly behind me and very supportive, and it was really wonderful to have everyone rally round.
I didn’t realise quite what I was letting myself in for, though – the project just seemed to grow and grow. The first thing to do was arrange a date, so we put 19 September 2014 in the diary and Sharon organised Mansion House, the Lord Mayor of the City of London’s home and office, as the stunning venue. That would bring everyone in, if nothing else, I thought. Then there was the matter of everything else to sort out. We had to get sponsors, a host, find an auctioneer, get prizes, sell the tables, provide entertainment… It did feel like a huge mountain to climb.
The biggest thing I realised was that the charity was still very unknown, so it was a case of speaking to a lot of people and holding meetings in person to motivate others to help us. But I believed in the project so completely and they saw that passion in me, so they really wanted to help. I knew that I had to put on some show-stopping entertainment too and there was only one thing that could be done: an evening of world-class dancing!
While I was planning and organising the event, Robin Windsor and I had a lot of dancing work to do, too. Mum was back over in the UK and so I invited her to join Robin and I on the Strictly Cruise that we do every year. It lasts ten days and my mum looked like a kid in a candy shop when we went on board! I suppose with her background in the shipbuilding business I could see why she was so fascinated by it all. And it was wonderful – although I did feel like I was the mother on the trip and she was the excitable child!
It was nice to be able to show her the world and take her to beautiful places. She was
so proud of me and I was so happy that she could experience this side of my work too, and see that people enjoyed watching Robin and me dance. We loved the sunshine and the local food and she would go out in the morning to the buffet and have lots of people come up to her, telling her how much they liked me and how much they liked me on the show. It’s lovely for my mum to hear such positive things about me and I remember her saying to me afterwards: ‘I don’t care how much the press get you down and write negative or depressive things about you, when you have all these people saying such lovely things about your work as a dancer, focus on them, not the newspapers!’
The cruise was at the end of April and Robin and I were solidly booked for several weeks in May, too, which normally would have been great. But Robin had started to complain about having a lot of pain in his lower back and he was struggling to stay on top of it. Actually, he first started to mention problems with his back in the November when he was dancing in Strictly and it was Blackpool Week. Everybody went out after the show to let their hair down (I stayed in the hotel to watch TV as I wasn’t interested in drinking) including Robin and some of the other dancers, members of the crew and celebrities.
When you are out and about with other dancers having fun and a few drinks, you just start dancing even more. I wasn’t there that night, but apparently, Robin tried to do a lift with one of the choreographers on the show and they both ended up on the floor. He ignored the pain (as I have mentioned before, being a dancer you just tend to dance through the aches and niggles) but by the end of the series he was still complaining about his back. And then on tour he was complaining, too, and that is just not like Robin at all. I realised something must have really hurt him, so I encouraged him to get it checked out.
Dancing Out of Darkness Page 20