It is already way past working hours, yet you can feel the Strictly Come Dancing machine still whirring. At the studios where the BBC dance competition will take place over the next few months, boxes of hairpieces are piled in the corridor, the lights are on around the mirrors in the makeup room, rails of sequinned dresses in frothy chiffon seem to jostle for a writhing body to fill them and is that one of the pro-dancers bouncing up the stairs topless? On the way to Craig Revel Horwood’s dressing room, I get a glimpse of fellow judge Anton Du Beke. He is, as you would expect, wearing a glittery tuxedo. If you have been watching Strictly for any of its 19-year run, it all feels both weirdly familiar and otherworldly.
At the beginning, Revel Horwood did not think Strictly would take off. “We were making it up as we went along and changing it constantly,” he says, from the sofa in his dressing room. He looks fit and youthful, dressed in a sleeveless athletics top and shorts. “But then it won the hearts and minds of the nation.”
A choreographer and director in the West End, Revel Horwood had been brought in as a fourth judge at the last minute and he is one of the show’s last survivors, alongside presenter Tess Daly and Du Beke. How long will he do it for? “I don’t have any intention of leaving.” He loves what he calls his “Saturday job”, and how inclusive it is, as a mainstream show. “That does teach the world, in all seriousness, that it’s OK to be different. It’s OK if you want to wear heels; it’s OK for men to wear pink sequins.”
Strictly’s celebrities have been diverse in terms of age, ethnicity and size. Paralympians often compete, such as Ellie Simmonds, as do celebrities including George Webster, the TV presenter who has Down’s syndrome who appeared in the 2022 Christmas special; the winner of the 2021 series, the actor Rose Ayling-Ellis, is deaf. Revel Horwood, who has appeared on the show in drag, was one of the driving forces behind allowing celebrities to compete with a same-sex partner. “A lot of people in the ballroom world didn’t want that to happen, but often [in dance classes] there aren’t enough men so women have to dance with each other anyway.” And there were some same-sex competitions in the dance world, he says. “I think Strictly proved that you can introduce something like that and people will accept it.”
Famously the harshest critic, and the hardest to please, it was a role he created almost instantly. “The first words out of my mouth were ‘dull, dull, dull’, and everyone booed me. Then suddenly, that was me, branded.” He smiles. “I never tried to be that, I was just being honest about what I was seeing, but there’s not a lot of time in television to do all the niceties along with it. Plus, that’s not my job as a judge. I have to tell it as I see it.”
Now fans appreciate his deadpan insults, and age – he is 58 – seems to have given him the air of an eternally disappointed headteacher, rather than a waspish upstart. But early on, he would receive hate mail and abuse in the street. Did that bother him? “No, because I don’t really care what people think. I challenge them to judge it themselves, and if they do, they generally agree with me.” In earlier series, he would go too far. In his memoir, All Balls and Glitter, he says he was made to apologise to previous contestants Patsy Palmer and Julian Clary for comments that were too personal. Do other celebrities take criticism badly? “Oh, lots of them. They might pretend not to, but no one likes criticism. I never liked it, but you have to accept it, and then try to use that criticism to be better.” Comedians tend to be the worst, he says, and actors and athletes are either used to it, or thrive on it.
One of the things I find most interesting is when the most reserved celebrities, usually those who are not performers, or actors who hide behind their characters, start to peel off the layers of inhibition. Can you be a good dancer if you don’t have that freedom of personality? “You can, you just have to be taught to release it. If you self-judge, you will always freeze, you will never be able to do anything.” It’s about, he says, “just getting up and doing it, not worrying about what people think. There is no fear, I don’t believe in fear.” Dancing is natural for humans, he adds: “Dance comes before language. It’s about the rhythm of getting on or off a train, or on to an escalator. That’s just movement, just rhythm in life.”
Does he really have no fear? He used to, he says. At school, he remembers being terrified at the prospect of having to read aloud. “Through fear you can close down. That has happened to me, certainly on stage, and that blocked me – stage fright – and it’s just stupid.” He learned to get out of his own way, and that making a mistake was not the worst thing that could happen. As a director, in rehearsal rooms with actors, he says: “I try to eliminate [fear] from people’s minds – you want them to be fearless, to not think of themselves – because that’s where true creativity comes from. There are people who can’t do that because of their upbringing, their psychological welfare or whatever, but I try to encourage people not to respond to fear.”
Revel Horwood was the second of five, born in Ballarat in Victoria, Australia; his father was a navy lieutenant, so the family moved around a lot, including a couple of years in the UK. It meant he found it hard to hold on to friends, but it also set him up for the nomadic life he has led since – away a lot touring, or joining different shows in different countries. “I don’t particularly call anywhere home,” he says (officially, home is in Northamptonshire with his fiance, Jonathan, a horticulturist and trainee paramedic; they met in 2018 on Tinder). Strictly, he says, has been the “only constant, really, in my life.”
His father was an alcoholic, and abusive; Revel Horwood’s mother experienced the worst of it, and the children knew to stay out of his way. “That was the reason I enjoyed dancing so much, because I was away from the house, because it wasn’t a happy home.” It must have been frightening as a child. “We escaped,” he says with a grim smile. “We knew after the seventh beer what was going to happen. We knew to go to our rooms, or go and do something else, go out on my bike. I wouldn’t hang around for it. It was worse for my mum – she couldn’t really do anything about it. He would change from one minute to the next. So dancing, for me, was an escape.”
As a child, he had loved to dress up and perform with his older sister, particularly at happier family gatherings. “I liked the double doors opening,” he says of the frosted glass sliding doors that were his version of curtain-up. “The adults used to encourage us and you’d get applause, it just created a really nice atmosphere.”
Once, his father was furious that the seven-year-old Revel Horwood had essentially performed in drag, and it can’t have been easy to be a teenage boy going to dance classes in smalltown Australia. “They wouldn’t accept anyone at school as a dancer – you’d be called a ‘pansy’, a ‘poofter’, everything under the sun.” Revel Horwood kept it secret. “Even me just doing home economics instead of woodwork was frowned on because I was quite effeminate – not that I knew I was, but I liked [playing] the recorder and I hated sport.” He was called homophobic names and threatened with violence; bullied for being overweight and teased for being in the recorder group. “Luckily, my music teacher was the best inspiration. She really gave me the confidence to continue with music.”
Questioning his sexuality – he had girlfriends, and in his 20s he was married to a woman for two years – Revel Horwood internalised a lot of shame. “I was completely homophobic,” he says. “But when I went to the theatre, when I did my first dance class, the people there were lovely, and people started praising me. They were older and accepting, and I loved it. I liked those people, and I knew I didn’t like people at school. I was traumatised at school, but dance released that.”
Revel Horwood was 15 when he left home and, after a short-lived period as an apprentice chef, he got a job at a TV station as a trainee cameraman. When he was 16, an older colleague in his 40s began to pursue him and eventually proposed a deal: he would take Revel Horwood away for six weeks, which would include going to shows in London and New York, and would pay for his dance classes, in return for a sexual relationship. In his 2009 memoir, Revel Horwood writes that it was “a business arrangement” and one that, at the age of 17, he felt in control of, but I wonder if conversations in recent years about power dynamics and exploitation have made him reconsider the “relationship”? “No,” he says. “I didn’t feel it was wrong. For me, it was a relationship in that way. It wasn’t rent on the corner of the street. It was a sugar daddy relationship, simple as.” Does it not feel exploitative in hindsight? “No. I got something from it and he got something from it, and then we went our separate ways. It could have been worse, I suppose. He was supportive of everything I was doing, dance-wise, and getting me through difficult times. Someone I could talk to – so for me, it was a learning experience, it taught me a lot and it wasn’t abusive in any way.”
Whatever the ethics of the arrangement, the trip – and the shows Revel Horwood saw – changed his life. Seeing Cats in London, and then on Broadway, cemented his dream to become a professional performer. Back in Australia, he moved to Melbourne to train and try to get roles. “I just kept auditioning and doing anything I could – teaching aerobics, moving house every five minutes, sofa surfing.” He was struggling in other ways: plagued by body issues as a teenager, it was around this time, that he developed an eating disorder. It happens to a lot of dancers, he says. “They do undereat, whether you like it or not, they do. Now they’re encouraged to eat more, but there is a thing that you look in the mirror, and you compare your body [to other dancers].” Getting cast in West Side Story, his first big professional job, was a defining moment, followed by a role in La Cage aux Folles in 1985 (he had also developed a drag act, Lavish).
Around that time, Australia’s Aids crisis was peaking, along with the stigma. La Cage aux Folles closed early. “Audiences were not coming to see the show because it had two men falling in love and was full of drag queens.” Even now, his voice rising, he looks shocked that people could have thought it was possible to contract HIV from sitting in the audience of a show. “Everyone was ill-informed, they called it the gay plague. And, yes, a lot of my friends died and I had to witness that. They were 21-year-olds dying, 22-year-olds, people who hadn’t even lived their lives. I sometimes wonder, how did I escape that? I just thought what is the world turning into? We are human beings, and it’s a human disease, not just a gay one, but they wanted to brand it as something. So the show closed after three months.”
He must have been going through a lot of grief at the time. “Yes, when someone is dropping dead every day, and people you’re working with.” How did he cope? “Doing the show helped. Being with friends helped. Theatre people are wonderful, they create families together. But what could you do? Nothing, except protect yourself. It was just a really sad time. Young, vibrant, amazing people having to deal with mortality and death.”
In the years afterwards, Revel Horwood’s work took him to Paris, then London, where he settled. For several years, he worked for the impresario Cameron Mackintosh, until he left to go it alone. Was he not scared that his career would be over, that he was losing a safe job? “Yeah, but I didn’t care. I’ll start again, do something else.” He says he still thinks like that. “If I get sacked from this,” he says, looking around his Strictly dressing room, “I’ll do something else. With Cameron, it did me the world of good because I was forced to go back into the gutter and start again.” It was hard – that first year, he earned so little he couldn’t afford a mobile phone, but it forced him, he says, to develop “bolshiness and confidence”.
These days, Revel Horwood doesn’t stop – he points to a schedule pinned on his wall that reminds him where he is supposed to be, and when. Throughout most of the Strictly run, he is also performing as Miss Hannigan in the touring production of Annie, then as Cinderella’s wicked stepmother in panto, and he often directs shows too. He created the life he wanted and now seems far from the traumatised, bullied teenager who was often too frightened to be at home. The “gear change”, as he calls it, was getting his first theatre job – he couldn’t believe he would be paid for something he would do for nothing. “I just went, ‘that’s it – this is going to happen now for the rest of my life. I want it to happen’.”
Strictly Come Dancing starts on Saturday 16 September at 6.35pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer
