When Strictly Come Dancing producers invited Krishnan Guru-Murthy to take part in the show this year, he had absolutely no intention of accepting. “They’ve been asking for quite a few years,” he says, sitting on a sofa in the airy atrium of ITN’s central London HQ, where Channel 4 News is based. “I didn’t pay much attention or give it much thought. We met for a coffee in June, and I – as I had before – said that I wasn’t interested.” But as he began to reel off his usual excuses – family holidays in August, immovable weekend work commitments, his physical health – he realised things had changed.
Both of his teenage children sat exams this year, so the family holiday had been booked for July, leaving August, when Strictly prep begins, open. And though for 24 years he’d worked during the weekend, which clashes with the Strictly schedule, his presenting timetable had recently changed. Last year he landed the role as lead anchor on Channel 4 News, succeeding Jon Snow – and his weekends cleared. And maybe he just felt better. “In the past, I’ve either been feeling really obese, not very well, or worried about my health,” Guru-Murthy goes on. “But this year I was caught at a good moment: I’m feeling a little healthier, and have lost a bit of weight, entirely coincidently.”
As one of the country’s most experienced and respected news presenters, it’s Guru-Murthy’s business to have rapid responses ready for every eventuality. But sitting across from Strictly’s execs, he struggled to articulate precisely why he was turning down the opportunity. “I couldn’t even fob them off by saying I’d do it next year – it would be impossible for me to do it during general election.” Guru-Murthy was uncharacteristically stumped. Much to his own surprise, he began to seriously consider the prospect of participating. “I rang my wife, and told her I was thinking of saying yes. She thought it was a good idea – which had never happened.”
We’re meeting barely two months after that moment, on a midweek August afternoon. Already the Strictly machine has whirred into action. Rehearsals might be yet to start, but there have been costume fittings, warm-up sessions, some early filming dates. For a fitness boost, he’s taken up pilates. It’s hectic, and his diary isn’t the only thing that’s needed adjusting. Yesterday I joined Guru-Murthy in the run-up to Channel 4 News’s live nightly broadcast. As the cameras rolled, he commanded the confidence of both newsroom and nation: he grilled a minister, covered the war in Ukraine, Hawaii’s wildfires, the cost of high inflation. For Guru-Murthy, news is a serious business. Today, he returned to the studio to be photographed letting loose in brightly coloured garb. Camping it up for the camera was, quite clearly, beyond his comfort zone. And this was without any cha cha cha-ing
“It’s hard,” he says, of shaking away his inhibitions. “ I don’t trust people normally. You saw what I’m like in the newsroom – I’m very involved. But I’m already doing things [for Strictly] I wouldn’t imagine. In fact a long time ago, I did some showbiz.” For a brief period back in 1994, Guru-Murthy flirted with the glitz and glamour of Saturday night telly. “I presented the show that was then in the Strictly slot: The National Lottery Live with Anthea Turner. I’d spend half my week on Newsnight as producer/reporter, and the other half on this primetime, big-budget entertainment show with massive audiences.” Six months in, Guru-Murthy was called into a meeting with a BBC bigwig. “The man who ran news said to me: do you want to be Bruce Forsyth or Jeremy Paxman? I had to make a decision.”
Guru-Murthy chose news. Why?- “Because I knew it’s what my love was. And I thought I could be the best when it came to news and current affairs, but I knew I could never be the best at entertainment. I could never get Bruce’s gig, but Jeremy’s felt feasible. So I left that all behind me.”
This year’s Strictly contestants met their professional counterparts for the first time a few weeks ago. “We did speed-dating with the pros: the men sat in a circle facing out, and the women pros circulated, dancing with each of us briefly and moving along to the next person.” A couple of laps were completed while execs considered who might make suitable partners. The experience was challenging. “I am not a dancer,” he says, “I was absolutely terrified turning up at that session. I’m quite shy. I’m not one to make friends very quickly. I work in news, not showbiz – and news isn’t about walking into a room and getting on with everyone. I was nervous to meet people. And nervous to dance. But we’re only at the very beginning. It’s not easy.” He pauses, for a moment. “News presenting is still a performance I suppose. There are lines of connection. But for me this is about trying to reconnect with who I was as a teenager – who I could have been if my career went differently – even if now it doesn’t come quite so naturally.”
The last time Guru-Murthy danced – really danced – he was 15 years old, on stage at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Blackburn. “I did lots of school drama,” he says, “and was always in plays and musicals. One year, in a production of South Pacific, I did a very bad routine in a blond straw wig, coconut bra and grass skirt. That was 38 years ago; I’ve not danced since.” He offers to provide photographic evidence.
Born in Liverpool in 1970, Guru-Murthy was raised in Lancashire. His parents came to the UK from India in the early 1960s, and after leaving Merseyside they lived on either side of Pendle Hill, first near Clitheroe, then settling just outside Nelson. He was a committed theatre kid: he joined the Manchester Youth Theatre, and later the National Youth Theatre, too. “I nearly went into movies at 17,” he says. “I was approached by a casting agent for a film directed by John Schlesinger about a young Asian pianist in London with an eccentric piano teacher, played by Shirley MacLaine.” He made it to the final two; the role went to Navin Chowdhry. “In my dim and distant past,” says Guru-Murthy, “something in me wanted to be a performer.”
That same sensibility led him to school debating, and he was successful at competitions. But while drama and debating might have been his extracurriculars of choice, as a teen it was in medicine he saw a future. “I was supposed to be a doctor,” he says, “like a good Indian boy, and like my dad. I did dream of being a barrister for a while, but after doing work experience in Manchester, I was told by some lawyers that the law was racist and I’d struggle as a young Asian to get to the top. I bottled it, and decided to do medicine.”
He landed a place at medical school, but in his gap year asked the BBC for work experience. After two weeks, he was offered a youth TV presenting gig. He soon switched his medical degree for PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) at Oxford. In his first week there, he was offered a chance to host a weekly BBC Two Asian current affairs show Eastern Eye, aged just 19.
“Fortunately,” he says, “the show was made in Birmingham, so I could drive up on a Wednesday, record on a Thursday and get back to university, even if I was writing essays in the dressing room. I travelled all over: to interview the president of Sri Lanka, to Kashmir, the first Benazir Bhutto elections in Pakistan. I was interviewing these world leaders, then coming back to write about them for my Asian politics papers.” By the end of his second year, his tutors were concerned. “I was told if I didn’t quit, I’d fail my degree. So I did. Then, a week before my final year, Newsround called to offer me a presenting position.” They agreed he could work in vacations while he completed finals, before going full-time upon graduation. A few years later, he went to Newsnight. After a stint on the BBC News Channel around its launch, in 1998 he was poached by Channel 4.
“I’ve been in the public eye since I was 18,” he says, “so I’ve not had a life where I could just do whatever I wanted. It has always been… not a calculation, but at the BBC, you’d get these warnings: you’re a public figure, a children’s TV presenter. There are a lot of responsibilities. I never went out and did all the things 20-somethings do, getting drunk, misbehaving. In another life, I’d have done Oxford drama, the Union, all that. I might well have ended up in performance, the arts. But once I got that first job in telly, all that stopped. I chopped it all out. Strictly is, I think, just me going back to who I was before TV happened.”
Neither on his way up, down, or looking to reinvent, Guru-Murthy isn’t standard Strictly fare by any means. Still, he ultimately found plenty of reasons to sign up. “They all come under the banner of: you only live once,” he says. The opportunity to once again inject balance into his working week was appealing. “The last few years have been intense in news,” he explains. “We’ve become almost entirely single-subject focused. For most of my career, news programmes were a balanced diet of home and foreign, entertainment and sports, social affairs. We covered the world comprehensively.” More recently, single topics have come to dominate for months or years at a time: Brexit, Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “It’s been serious and stressful. And frankly, news is so much at the centre of the culture wars, it’s stressful being at the heart of it. You’re constantly being scrutinised. There are people waiting to jump on every little word. This is an opportunity to do something joyful.”
Guru-Murthy’s YOLO attitude also extends to the personal. “I am at that stage in my life where I know lots of people going through very difficult times, either in health or personal terms. I’ve got elderly parents who squeeze every last experience out of life. I’m really starting to have this realisation: you have to get the absolute most out of life before you’re decrepit. I’ve got various health issues, which I’m constantly aware of. I’ve got a genetic heart condition – hypertrophic cardiomyopathy – which has killed two of my cousins, Crohn’s disease, various other things I won’t bore you with. I even asked my cardiologist if I might drop dead live on BBC One. No, was his answer – but he couldn’t give me an absolute guarantee.” His training, however, will be tempered. “I have to be careful of raising my heartbeat into the red zone; that final 15%. I shouldn’t go there. It’s where people with my condition drop dead… They’ve been asking me to do these sorts of shows for years. What if I kept saying no? It might not be physically possible for me to do it now – that remains to be seen. But it certainly won’t be possible in five years.”
Something clicked this year. “I’m the main anchor on the [Channel 4] show now. I feel more established. That comes with validation. I finally won the Presenter of the Year at the RTS awards. And my kids have just finished GCSEs and A-levels – they’re more independent. I’ve some space to play around with me.” His daughter, 18, is already cheering dad on. “My 16-year-old son is appalled and embarrassed, and desperately doesn’t want me to do it. He keeps asking: do you realise there’ll be videos of you dancing badly on the internet forever?”
Guru-Murthy is a man accustomed to doing the probing in interviews. Now he’s the one getting media training. Strictly is, by all accounts, a TV beast, one that comes with vast exposure and the real risk of becoming tabloid fodder. “I’m maybe a little wary,” he says, “but I worry I’m a bit boring, and that nobody is going to be that interested in me. I’ve already got 4:1 odds to be the first one out, so maybe that is what showbiz columnists are thinking. I’m not going to suddenly reveal everything about my personal and family life, so I am a bit nervous about it – it’s a different world.”
Practically, Strictly is going to be a mammoth task. Throughout its run, he’ll continue to present the news three nights a week: he’ll be at Tory party conference, and will take a trip to Taiwan for a special programme. Right now, he doesn’t know the difference between Latin and ballroom. I ask if, at least, he has rhythm. His reply is noncommittal. “I love music, feel music, and can move in time. If that helps? But I’m not sure that means I can foxtrot. I’m far more confident with clapping.” It’s possible, of course, he’ll do a Bill Bailey and surprise us all – himself, too. He might well also be this series’s Ann Widdecombe or Ed Balls.
Is he concerned that, should his dancing skills never quite materialise, audiences and interviewees might, come Monday, take him less seriously? “I’ve no idea how I’ll do, but I think the audience knows me well,” he replies. “They’ve grown up with me and know what I’m about. As for guests? Having something soft to break the adversarial ice might be helpful. I’ll carry on doing what I do. It would be very funny, I think, if anyone dared take me less seriously going into an interview because I’m doing Strictly. Good luck with that. See how you get on, is what I’d say to them.”
Strictly Come Dancing returns on BBC One and BBC iPlayer later this month
Grooming by Carol Morley at Carol Hayes Management using Bumble and Bumble and Bobbi Brown
