Oti Mabuse is the only person ever to win Strictly Come Dancing two years in a row, but the great unspoken rule about competitive television is that people don’t really care who wins. In fact, she was already the ballroom’s sweetheart for her samba with Hollyoaks’ Danny Mac in 2016 – a moment so exhilarating that people stood up to cheer when they were halfway through it.
“That was when it all started to change for me,” she says, fresh from a photoshoot, at a rooftop bar in west London. She has a ready, infectious smile that grows ever wider when she’s describing moments of great resolve in her life: when she told her mother, for instance, that she wasn’t going to finish her civil engineering degree in Pretoria, South Africa, but was instead moving to Germany for its competitive ballroom dancing scene; when she tries to persuade her husband, the dancer Marius Iepure, to do another maths quiz (she loves quizzes). Charm, charisma, razzle-dazzle, sure, she has all those things, but what also stands out is how hypnotically persuasive she is.
