Watching the blind comedian Chris McCausland’s cha-cha-cha on Strictly, complete with lifts, slides, jumps and swinging his professional dance partner Dianne Buswell through his legs, it seemed the BBC had served up the perfect antidote to the ugly controversies that have recently dogged its flagship show.
Shirley Ballas declared herself “quite shocked and very emotional” while fellow judge Anton du Beke acclaimed the performance to be “one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in my entire life, just brilliant”.
Given McCausland, 47, who lost his sight to retinitis pigmentosa 20 years ago, has previously said he “couldn’t tell you what a tango is, or a pasodoble, or the cha-cha-cha, in terms in visuals”, few could fail to be impressed.
Aside, that is, from Strictly’s resident curmudgeon, Craig Revel Horwood, whose comments on dropped shoulders and unstraight legs prompted the McCausland riposte: “I’m too knackered to care, mate. Give me whatever score you want,” before adding: “I’ll drive you home tonight!”
What the Liverpool-born standup lacked in dance skills as he bounced around to the Beatles’ hit version of Twist and Shout, he made up for with wisecracks.
Already, online fans after just one show have declared him the Glitterball winner. One newspaper even posited: “Is Chris McCausland the man to SAVE Strictly?” – a reference to the departure of two pro dancers, Graziano de Prima and Giovanni Pernice, after allegations of abusive behaviour towards their celebrity partners during training.
McCausland is an experienced TV performer. A former web developer, having studied software engineering at Kingston University, he embarked on a career in comedy when his eyesight, which had reduced to 10% by the age of 11, got “worse and worse and the websites just got uglier and uglier”. Nobody “wanted an ugly website”, he has said, so he quit for a stint in a call centre.
He had flirted with the idea of becoming a spy, telling the Guardian in 2021 that he had “got down to the last 30 out of 3,000 for MI5 selection”. But he was rejected: “Fair play.” The job was identifying and targeting terrorist threats, “which obviously you need to do in a limited amount of time. They were like: ‘Honestly, we just think it’s going to take you too long. I was like: ‘OK, that’s reasonable. I don’t want that burden around my neck,’” he said.
So, comedy it was. While at the call centre, he tried standup at open mic nights. He won a newcomer award, began to get recognition, his reputation grew, and a seven-year stint at the Edinburgh festival fringe followed, along with an appearance on Live at the Apollo.
He joined the CBeebies series Me Too, as Rudi, the market trader. “If you Google my name, one of the suggested options has always been: ‘Chris McCausland, Me Too.’ Anyone who doesn’t know CBeebies must look at it and go: “Oh my God, what’s the dirty bastard done?” he once told the Observer.
In recent years, he has been a regular panellist on comedy shows such as Have I Got News for You, Would I Lie to You?, QI, The Last Leg, and 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.
He has also fronted the Channel 4 travel show Wonders of the World I Can’t See. “We thought a key theme of the series might be what these places smell like. But the truth is, shit smells like shit and doughnuts smell like doughnuts. You don’t go: “Ooh, doesn’t the Acropolis smell Greek?” he has said.
His acting work includes starring in Jimmy McGovern’s drama series Moving On and he has fronted his own chatshow on ITV1.
A father to daughter Sophie, 10, with his wife, Patricia, a clinical psychologist, McCausland never really envisaged being on Strictly, and has few cultural references to draw on to relate to the award-winning series.
When he was a teenager, before his sight deteriorated into the grey fuzziness he experiences now, “it was all rock and metal, mosh pits, crowdsurfing and headbanging,” he told the Radio Times. He has never tuned into the show, or even been in the same room when it was on.
But having turned down repeated requests to appear – long before the recent controversies – he eventually succumbed, “to flattery” and partly because he thought it was a good idea to be out of his “comfort zone”. Also, he hoped to highlight “just how capable and resilient blind people are”.
He believes he won’t be there for long and has to get the jokes in early as he will be gone in three weeks. One early Strictly hit was when fellow contestant Dr Punam Krishan, BBC’s Morning Live medical expert, revealed she’d be keeping up with her GP work while training. McCausland immediately interjected: “Can I just say, none of us can believe we’ve managed to get in the same room as a GP.”
His online fans erupted with delight. “Just give the glitterball to Chris McCausland NOW,” one posted on X. Another said: ‘Whoever’s idea it was to try and get Chris McCausland on this year’s Strictly Come Dancing … All I can say is … It was a stroke of absolute GENIUS.”
