Forget the dancers. It’s the judges on Strictly Come Dancing who should be given points. For pithiness and critical zeal, none of the current line-up match up to Arlene Phillips who, this year, is commenting from the sidelines - having been dumped there by BBC bosses.
Last week she let rip about Ann Widdecombe’s elephantine charm: “Like bottled water, she’s thoroughly over-rated,” she wrote in her tabloid column. “She started off like a flying bedspread and at the end Anton was mopping the floor with her.”
This week the sight of Widdecombe, dressed as a feathered blueberry, left her able only to “watch, moan, despair and try to smile.” The brunt of her Saturday tongue-lashing was reserved for the two lowest scorers. Felicity Kendal’s salsa she deemed “like cold soup”, while her feet were “treading treacle”. As for Destiny’s Child star Michelle Williams’ paso doble, oh dear. “She looked like she was lost on the battlefield. There was no danger, no bellow, no charge of the bull.”
Phillips is well qualified for putting dancers in their place, she explains over a coffee in central London, squeezed in between TV appearances and her multitude of business interests. She has spent more than forty years auditioning hopefuls for virtually every musical to hit the West End stage. “I like dancers who demand of themselves to achieve, not just technically but also as performers,” she explains. “When people enter any form of competition they need to be able to connect with the audience at home; that’s what makes them different. They have to connect with their eyes.”
Those who don’t meet her exacting standards have called her a “bitch” but she was once at the receiving end of harsh criticism herself. Though painful, she believes it prevented her from wasting her life as a second-rate ballerina. “Not only was I not a good dancer,” she says with some of the “passion and bluntness” which she brings to judging, “I was one of the worst. I didn’t have the long thin legs, and I didn’t have natural turnout. The only thing I had was determination.”
It paid off in 1974 when Phillips, then 30, revolutionised television dancing by creating Hot Gossip, a troupe of hot-pant-clad young women who oozed sex and indivuality - making bland, leggy Tiller Girls appear hopelessly outdated. That same determination has allowed her to make the most of her own relegation to the BBC scrapheap.
Five years as a judge on Strictly has “catapaulted her to public notice”. Seizing the opportunity, the once-penniless daughter of a Manchester barber and a classroom assistant has made the most of every offer and idea to come her way, from designing clothes for Marisota, to selling her jewellery designs on-line and creating the Vie range of make-up. As well as judging the American series, So You Think You Can Dance, she has made fitness videos and written Alana’s Dancing Star, a series of books for girls who dream of break-dancing or samba, rather than classical ballet.
She is far from being crushed by the ageism which most people believe, despite the BBC’s denials, lies behind the decision to replace Phillips, now 67, with Alesha Dixon, 31. Eighteen months ago when she was axed, it looked suspiciously as though a double standard was in operation when octogenarian host Bruce Forsyth remained. But what does Phillips think, as she sits curled up on a sofa, looking girlish with minimal make-up in a cosy woollen dress?
I’m hoping that she wants to let rip, having read on her Twitter page earlier in the morning that she was in a “foul mood” and want to “scream at someone”. Sadly, breakfast seems to have calmed her down. “I’m not convinced it was ageism,” she says carefully. “The BBC had their reasons.” That is all she will say about this taboo subject - given that BBC 1 controller, Jay Hunt, is currently trying to convince an industrial tribunal that the sacking of Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly had nothing to do with looks.
What Phillips can do, however, is crow about the level of public support she has enjoyed as a result of the BBC’s non-ageist, non-sexist decision to get rid of Strictly’s most knowledgeable judge. “Even now when I go out in the street people stop me to tell me how wrong it was,” she says, with a unmistakeable note of triumph. “They send me messages on Twitter and Facebook to say how much they miss me.”
A while ago Phillips said that she was supplanted by former contestant and Mis-teeq singer, Dixon, because the BBC wanted “the voice of the viewer”. If the plan was to rope in younger viewers with a Cheryl Cole substitute, it seems to have failed. I’ve asked a dozen under -30s if they watch Strictly. From their reactions it is clear that they would not be seen dead admiring all that prancing about in spangly dresses when they can save their Saturday evenings for The X-Factor.
Oldies, however, continue to enjoy the glamour of flesh-coloured tights chiefly, it seems, because of Ann Widdecombe’s dauntless lack of grace. Cynically, one might say that Phillips is capitalising on her popularity with older people by selling them goods and services - she is currently an ambassaor for EDF Energy’s winter fuel campaign. But it’s more than a way of making money. She’s on a mission.
“I’m trying to be a voice for older people,” she says, launching into her qualifications: involvement in Carer’s Week and the Alzheimer’s Society, as well as a sore left knee which no longer allows her to jump up and down to demonstrate dance moves. “I want to spread the word about visiting older people. There are 40,000 people living in isolation with no one to visit them. People are living longer. More and more people have great-grandparents. Everyone is taking care of the kids now, but older people are being overlooked.”
Her own parents are both long gone. Her mother died of leukaemia when Arlene was 15, leaving her middle child too fragile to leave home to seek her fortune as a dancer for a further eight years. When she finally came to London for a week, it was because she was sent for training by the principal of the ballet school where she taught.
“On my way to a class at the Dance Centre, I passed a class on Modern American Jazz class. 'I wonder if that’s like West Side Story?’” she recalls. “By the end of that class I knew I was never going back to Manchester. The teacher said she had a room in her house and they needed someone to work in the Dance Centre’s coffee shop, so I called my family and my ballet teacher to say I was staying. It took me a couple of years but I paid back the cost of the trip to London, even though I was living on no money at all.”
Her father, whom she cared for when he suffered from Alzheimer’s, died ten years ago. But Phillips isn’t telling others to take on a responsibility which she doesn’t shoulder herself. Angus Ion, her partner, both romantically and in business (they met when he was a set designer for Freddie Mercury), has an 82-year-old mother whom they visit regularly in Herefordshire. She is always cold, they find. Hence Phillips’s eagerness to be involved in the EDF’s Safe Warm and Well campaign which dispenses advice about wearing more woollies in winter, taking exercise and eating hot meals.
Such campaigns remain a side issue for her. Since the break-through with Hot Gossip, choreography has been her main occupation. It’s not a huge money spinner, she says, but she has always remained solvent by following a simple rule given to her when she got her first big cheque from the Kenny Everett show: whatever you are paid, halve it, because half will go to the taxman.
The flow of work is good at the moment. Flashdance opened in October to mixed reviews. Soon she starts rehearsals of The Wizard of Oz at the Palladium, knocking the Munchkins into shape. Phillips was not a judge on Over the Rainbow, from which Danielle Hope emerged as Dorothy but, fortunately for Hope, Phillips approves: “She’s adorable, and she’s a good dancer”.
As for the Strictly competitors, Arlene will continue to let rip.
Arlene Phillips is an ambassador for EDF Energy’s Safe, Warm and Well campaign. For more information and advice about keeping warm this winter, please visit www.edfenergy.com/safewarmandwell.
