Strictly Come Dancing’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy reveals how the show totally changed his outlook on life

When Krishnan Guru-Murthy finally agreed to don his dancing shoes and join this year’s Strictly cast, he had very firm ideas about how far he would go on the sequins-and-glitter front.

‘I told the wardrobe team I wanted to be only a slightly glamorous Saturday night version of what I look like on the News,’ he recalls.

Which hasn’t gone exactly to plan: at last check, there aren’t that many broadcast news journalists wearing Hawaiian shirts, ruffles, and eyeliner on live TV, as Krishnan has been doing for the past few Saturday evenings, nor the eye-poppingly garish blue sequinned shirt and bright yellow trouser ensemble that he wore for his Samba a week ago.

‘I actually requested sequins,’ he says. ‘I realised I hadn’t had any so far and I was feeling a bit left out. Thank goodness I did.’

Because, as Strictly fans will know, Krishnan’s time on the show ended that weekend when he was voted out by the judges after a dance-off against another news veteran, 79-year-old Angela Rippon.

It meant he didn’t make it to the famed Blackpool Tower Ballroom on Saturday.

But his gradual embrace of Strictly flamboyance is rather a metaphor for the 53-year-old’s experience over the past two months, transforming him from sober newscaster into what he calls ‘one of those gibbering old men wrecks who suddenly get in touch with their emotions and cry all the time’.

He’s only half joking: he spent most of last Monday in tears, following his exit, and is being supported by his former cast members. ‘We’re all in touch, and everyone who’s gone out before has said it takes a while to process how you feel about it,’ he says.

Hang on. This is a dance contest remember… but then as we know from previous contestants, it tends to end up being rather more than that.

‘I’ve basically done the same job for 35 years really, just for different organisations,’ he says. 

‘You can get stuck in a routine. Doing something that was just so different — it’s a huge kick when you make it work. That risk-taking is very rewarding; it really changes your outlook on life.’

Alongside him, his photographer wife Lisa — who joins us for this interview along with their children, Jasmine, 18, and 16-year-old Jay — enthusiastically affirms the view of her husband of 18 years.

‘He had quite a serious job, and being able to do Strictly and immerse himself completely in that world, as well as discovering that actually he loves to dance and that he’s quite good at it, has been great,’ she says. ‘He got hooked.’

And not only on the dancing front: while today Krishnan is clad in a sober black sweatshirt, Jay reveals his father has latterly been sporting a hitherto unseen leather jacket. 

‘I’ve never seen him in stuff like that,’ he says, while Jasmine reports that he came to meet her for lunch recently wearing ‘these really fancy light blue trousers’.

Then there’s the weight loss. Tipping the scales at 15st earlier this year, he has lost two-and-a-half stones, only half joking at the start of Strictly when he said he was motivated to trim down because he had a ‘much hotter’ wife.

This kind of chat is in itself new territory for Krishnan, who’s always been a serious kind of chap. An Oxford PPE graduate, he joined Channel 4 in 1998. 

He’s now their lead presenter, quizzing world leaders and politicians, and also presents Unreported World, a foreign affairs documentary series which has taken him to India, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, South Africa and Yemen.

This is all a long way from the Strictly glitterball, and he admits that, for a long time, it was easy to bat off the persistent approaches of the show’s producers. 

‘At first, I think I was very hung up on being a serious journalist and thinking you don’t do that kind of thing,’ he says. ‘But this year it just felt different. I felt like having some fun, doing something different.’

The notion was embraced enthusiastically by Lisa, who was pleasantly surprised to find that her husband had ‘got some moves on him’. 

Student Jasmine was also a vocal cheerleader, confiding she ‘screamed with excitement’ when she first saw footage of him dancing, leaving the ‘appalled and embarrassed’ Jay the sole refusenik begging his father not to do it.

‘I thought it wasn’t the best idea,’ he admits now, sheepishly. ‘To be honest, I didn’t have that big a faith in him that he could dance, because, apart from cycling, I didn’t really see him exercise.’

His one consolation was a fundamental suspicion that his dad wouldn’t last long on the show — a sense shared by all the family.

‘I think we all thought I would be done after a couple of weeks,’ Krishnan says. ‘I was certainly the bookies’ favourite to go out first.’

Then, what do you know, together with his professional partner Lauren Oakley, this unlikely looking groover cha-cha-chaed and waltzed all the way to week eight, even garnering some respectable scores on the way (their Charleston and Quickstep numbers got a 30), while battling some of the worst nerves he’s ever experienced.

‘Waiting to go on, it’s the first time I’d felt those sort of butterflies and terror since I was a kid,’ he reveals. 

‘Obviously, in News, you might sometimes have a few nerves if you’re doing something on a big breaking story, but I’ve never had that gut feeling of ‘I’m terrified’ until Strictly. That was new to me.’

In Bristol, English student Jasmine says she was praying her dad wouldn’t fall, as she watched with her friends. ‘We would all watch it in the kitchen, everyone commenting on his dance moves and getting excited when he did a lift right. But he did so well.’

It helped that Krishnan bonded immediately with Lauren, a 32-year-old former broadcast journalism student. 

‘We got on really well from day one,’ Krishnan says. ‘Lauren is really cheerful and easy to get along with.’ 

The same can be said of his feelings for the eclectic bunch that was his fellow contestants, with whom he insists there was never a cross word.

He formed a particularly close bond with former professional tennis player Annabel Croft, 56, who has spoken movingly about how taking part in the show has helped her manage her grief at the sudden death this year of her husband, Mel Coleman, from cancer.

Back at home, Lisa says that her husband’s frantic schedule — he also continued to present the News — meant she barely saw him, although he would ring her with updates. Jay, meanwhile, tended to come across his exhausted dad falling asleep on the sofa in the evening, and tell him to go to bed.

Jay finally agreed to go to the live show on week three. When he did relent, it was to be greeted with a sign wielded by co-host Claudia Winkleman reading ‘Welcome Jay’, to his clear mortification. By week four he was, as Krishnan puts it, ‘communicating with Claudia through the medium of T-shirts’.

‘Claudia had a ‘Hello Jay’ T-shirt and Jay had one saying ‘Hello Claudia’. It’s hanging upstairs now.’ By the time of his final show, Claudia had nothing less than a full cardboard cut-out of Jay on display.

I suggest that Jay himself might want to sign up next year, although that seems to be a bridge too far at the moment. ‘I actually don’t think I’m that good a dancer,’ he says. ‘Maybe Dad could teach me.’

He could do worse: one of the joys of the series has been seeing a bespectacled middle-aged man ‘get into his bliss’ as Lisa wryly calls it. The general public certainly enjoyed it: Krishnan says people stopped him in the street to tell him they loved what he was doing, while it turns out that even our most buttoned-up politicians are secret fans.

‘I interviewed Jacob Rees-Mogg last Monday, which was the massive, dramatic day of Suella Braverman’s sacking and David Cameron’s return, and off-camera all we talked about was Strictly,’ he laughs. 

‘When I interviewed Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves the week before the Conservative Party conference, all they wanted to talk about was Strictly, too. Actually, I realised that it has helped soften my relationship with people on that level, which is only a good thing.’

Which makes it all the more bittersweet that Krishnan’s journey has now come to an end — just as he was getting a handle on those nerves, too.

If only the producers would take on board the radical idea he and Annabel came up with, then he would still be there.

‘We were saying this whole thing of elimination is all very 20th century: why can’t we all just stay in and dance every week, and then we could have a winner at the end of the season?’ he says. ‘It’s a real shame that people have to go out at all, to be honest, because they are all very entertaining.’

That’s something for the Strictly big guns to contemplate, but Krishnan insists he’s going to keep dancing anyway. ‘Lauren and I have agreed that every other time we meet up, rather than going out for dinner, we’ll go to a dance studio and that will be our catch-up,’ he says.

If there’s one message he wants to put out there, it’s this: ‘You’ve got to try new things, you’ve got to push yourself and you’ve got to take on challenges.

He’s gone up a few notches in his kids’ estimation, too. ‘I think he’s pretty cool,’ admits Jay. ‘And seeing him smile a lot, I think that’s pretty cool in itself, just him looking the happiest while dancing.’

‘I’ve always thought he was cool, but this is just on another level,’ adds Jasmine. ‘Now, he’s got swagger.’

Can there be greater praise from a teenager? ‘I’ll settle for that,’ Krishnan says.