Try as you might, it’s impossible to talk to Bobby Brazier without thinking of his mum. The model, EastEnders actor and eldest son of the late reality TV superstar Jade Goody, has that same megawatt energy – and is all cherubic features, soft brown eyes, white teeth and carefree attitude. As he appears on my laptop, he’s literally dancing in his seat. “I’m gooood!” he says, his accent carrying a playful, Essex edge, as he beams in from the BBC’s New Broadcasting House. “I’ve got my peppermint tea with me, got two lovely people with me.” He gestures to the publicists off-screen, then peers cartoonishly into the camera, trying to get a closer look at the cookbooks in my kitchen. “Ottolenghi? Sounds like a pasta!”
Brazier is palpably young, our points of reference very much at odds. He’s so young, in fact, that he’s the youngest person getting dunked in glitter for Strictly Come Dancing this year, and I would love to be a fly on the wall when he does small talk with fellow contestant and proper grown-up Channel 4 newsreader Krishnan Guru-Murthy, and septuagenarian Angela Rippon. Brazier tells me he was cast on Strictly after “begging” Chris Clenshaw, executive producer on EastEnders, to throw his name in the ring. “My boss mentioned that he’d been in talks with Strictly and it was time to put someone forward,” he says, “so he was checking how the storylines would work around the time, and I just said to him, ‘Let me do it. Please, please let me do it. You won’t regret it.’ And by his grace, I’m now doing it, and I’m really, really, really, really, really, really, really grateful.”
