Len Goodman went from East End barrow boy to the unlikeliest of ballroom dance stars whose Cockney style opened up the glamorous world of sequins and sashays to millions.
Yet if it weren’t for a twist – or perhaps a cha-cha-cha? – of fate, most of us would never have heard of Len Goodman.
The seasoned professional dancer and four-time British champion, who died on Saturday aged 78, was about to hang up his shoes and retire to his beloved golf course when the BBC decided to revive its once-popular ballroom dancing show from the 1960s and 70s.
All four judges had already been chosen and offered contracts for the new Strictly Come Dancing – but at the very last moment, one of them dropped out. One of the show’s dancers, Erin Boag, suggested a dance teacher she knew from Dartford who was “a bit of a character”... and the rest, as they say, is history.
Len proved an instant and enduring hit on the show, a different, down-to-earth kind of judge who millions of Saturday night viewers could relate to.
With his cheeky one-liners and banter with the contestants and audience – not to mention his enthusiastic shouting of “Se-VEN!” – many credit him with making Strictly one of the UK’s most popular ever shows.
Viewers lapped up his clashes with flamboyant Craig Revel Horwood, as well as his hilarious catchphrases like “yum yum, pig’s bum” and “spank me gently with a wet chamois”, not to mention his putdowns.
He once compared Anita Rani’s tango to “a cowpat on Countryfile: hot and steamy”, while told broadcaster Jeremy Vine his jive “was like watching a stork who’d been struck by lightning”.
It wasn’t just his refusal to take himself seriously that made Len one of Strictly’s biggest stars.
Cut from a very different cloth to most of his fellow judges and professional dancers, his ballroom career once seemed as unlikely as his late rise to fame.
The son of an electrician, Len was born in Farnborough, Kent, and brought up London’s East End, where his family scraped living selling vegetables from barrows, before eventually saving enough buy to a greengrocer’s shop in Bethnal Green.
His grandfather, Albert, would pawn his gold watch every Monday morning to buy the week’s supply.
Len would later find out, from an episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are, just how far back grinding poverty stretched in his family. Many of his ancestors suffered in the Victorian workhouses, while his great, great grandfather had taken his own life aged 69 because he couldn’t face being sent there.
Len, a keen footballer and cricketer, left school at 15, remembering once being told by his headmaster: “You’re a failure in class. You’ll be a failure in life.”
He began an engineering apprenticeship before getting a welding job at a shipbuilding firm on the Thames in North Woolwich.
Earning enough to dress as a Mod and enjoy himself on a Saturday night, he worshipped rock ’n’ roll and looked down his nose at the ballroom dancing which his dad, also named Leonard, and stepmother Irene, were fans of.
But that all changed when he broke his metatarsal bone playing football on Hackney Marshes aged 20, and was advised by his doctor to find an activity to help build his strength again.
When his dad suggested ballroom dancing, he scoffed at the idea: “Not on your life. I love jiving and there’s only one Saturday night a week and I’m not wasting it on a load of old fuddy-duddies doing ballroom dancing.”
He eventually agreed to give it a try and with dance partner Cherry Kingston, who he later married, Len won his first dance competition at the Royal Albert Hall at an event sponsored by Pontins.
Cheering them on in the audience were 53 fellow dock workers who had hired a coach to come and support him.
The couple went on to compete in and win many other dancing competitions together, including British Professional Rising Stars in 1972 and Duel of the Giants in 1973, then decided to drive up and down the country demonstrating the cha-cha-cha and rhumba to beginner dance classes. They opened their own dance school in Dartford, amusing Len when he realised he had become “Britain’s first ex-dock worker-cum-welder dance teacher.”
They also gave demonstrations on the holiday camp circuit, where Len learned how to work for a crowd with his Cockney banter.
The couple finally retired from dancing after winning the British Championships in Blackpool when Len was in his late 20s.
Always self-deprecating, he later said: “I only won because a couple of other people weren’t in it who should have been. I thought, ‘Well, I won’t win this again’, so I thought I’d retire a winner.”
But the decision to stop dancing took a toll on their marriage, and Cherry left him for a millionaire Frenchman, leaving him broken-hearted and with only half the business.
He later met Lesley, the former wife of the manager of Black Sabbath, with whom he had a baby son, James. They at first struggled to keep the dance school afloat, but then the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, then Grease a year later, came along and saved the business.
The movies sparked a new craze and queues of wannabe dancers lined up the street to their school after Len put up posters with the words: “You’ve heard the music, now learn the dances.”
He later said teaching dance was his real passion, adding: “ If they’re having a good time, I’ve done my job. If they’re learning to dance at the same time, that’s a bonus.”
West Ham fan Len was getting ready to retire when, about to turn 60 and settled with new partner Sue, he got the call from the BBC.
Then, a year later in 2005, history repeated itself. One of the judges booked for the rebranded Dancing with the Stars in the US didn’t perform well in the pilot, and within 24 hours Len was on a plane to Los Angeles, and for over a decade he charmed viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. When in LA, he shared an apartment with fellow judge Bruno Tonioli.
Len secretly battled and beat prostate cancer in 2009, and in 2015 had a knee replacement operation but refused to take a week off, appearing on Strictly on crutches.
His love of music also lead to several special Radio 2 shows, where he was a regular deputy to Paul O’Grady, who died last month aged 67.
He left Strictly on Christmas Day 2016, and the US show in 2022, for a reason that makes his passing on Saturday all the more tragic.
As he said goodbye to the BBC show, Len told the Mirror that his dad died at the age of 79 and that he was determined to spend more time with his grandchildren and family.
“That’s only seven years away from my age now,” he said. “Although I hope to live until I’m 99, I need to have more time.”
Len, ex-welder and lifelong entertainer, would have been 79 today.
