Of course Annabel Croft wanted to win Strictly. She insists she hadn’t fantasised about victory when she signed up for the show – ‘I never, EVER looked at the Glitterball and thought, ‘I want to win that’ ‘ – but by the time she reached the semi-finals she was starting to wonder if she and her professional partner Johannes Radebe could go all the way.
‘When we stayed in week after week, I did start to think, ‘Gosh, is it possible?’ ‘ she admits.
But the reason she wanted to win was nothing to do with sporting competitiveness being hard-wired into the psyche of the former tennis star.
‘If it was possible, I wanted to win, not just for myself, but for Johannes,’ she says, ‘because I knew what it would mean to him. Winning Strictly would have been his Wimbledon, and I wanted to give that to him.’
Alas, it was not to be. The pair didn’t survive last Saturday’s dance-off, and as viewers could see, as they took to the floor for their farewell dance, it fell to Annabel to console a visibly distraught Johannes.
‘He was really devastated, much more so than I was,’ she reveals. ‘I thought we’d done amazingly well, way more than I ever anticipated, but he thought we could do it.’
What a journey, though. Annabel, tennis pro turned commentator, was the last surviving contestant who had no professional acting or dancing experience, and at 57 she was twice the age of her rivals. ‘They are all so lovely, so young,’ she says of the three finalists, Bobby Brazier, Ellie Leach and Layton Williams, who are still in their 20s.
Her extra years hadn’t stopped her mastering the splits (‘which I definitely couldn’t have done at the start of all this’) and wowing the judges with her grace and elegance.
She tells me that Johannes was astonished when she would disappear during their supposed lunch breaks to practise steps on her own. ‘He’d never had someone do that before, but I needed to,’ she points out. ‘I didn’t want to let him down.’
But it was for her attitude that Annabel was most applauded. She had come into the contest from the most difficult place – as a new widow struggling to work out how to navigate that role.
She had been with her husband Mel, her ‘greatest supporter, cheerleader and anchor’ for 36 years. He had been her first serious boyfriend. Mel died in May, just 16 weeks after having been diagnosed with colon cancer, and she was openly in bits – but also in the position of ‘having to step out in front of eight million people and sparkle’.
I met Annabel early in the contest when her grief was still raw and she was barely able to get through a sentence without tears. She explained how she still hadn’t been able to pick up Mel’s ashes and couldn’t bear to touch the suits that were still hanging in his wardrobe. She confessed that she didn’t know how she would cope with the Strictly training schedule – or how Johannes would cope with her and her grief.
She did know one thing, though, she was going to give it her best shot, if only because Mel would have wanted her to.
How proud he would have been to see the Strictly audience give her a standing ovation. ‘He was always proud of everything I did. I just wish he could have been here to see it. And to meet Johannes. That’s a big regret, that they never got to meet, because they would have roared with laughter together.’
The partnership between Annabel and Johannes has touched hearts, perhaps more than any other pairing in the history of the show. Forget the showiness of the Strictly sequins, this was the real thing: a bona fide connection on the dancefloor, and off it too.
On her exit interview with Tess Daly, Annabel said Johannes had given her a reason to get out of bed in the morning and brought light into her life. Today, in reflective mood, she goes further, painting Johannes as a life-saver.
‘I got terribly nervous before every performance, particularly in the early weeks. I’d never have been able to do it if I hadn’t had at least one member of my family in the audience, but even when they said, ‘Just enjoy it, Mum’, you can’t.
‘Your heart beats so fast you think you are going to have a heart attack. I’m sure that if the camera had come in close you would have seen my heart pounding.
‘Johannes would feel it. He would say, ‘I don’t like how fast your heart is racing – we have to get that heart rate down’, and he’d take me in hold and make me breathe with him, and I could actually feel my heart rate lower.
‘I came to trust him completely. He’s also the best hugger in the world – he has these strong arms that just wrap themselves around you and take away all the pain.’
When was the moment she realised that she was not only in safe hands, but in potentially healing hands?
‘That came when he made me laugh,’ she declares. ‘The thing that has most surprised me was how much I have laughed over the past weeks. When Mel died, I didn’t think I would ever laugh, or feel joy, again. But during our training I would end up in hysterics about something.’
She is laughing now, recalling the moment when Johannes was trying out moves for their pasodoble. She was lying on the floor, pretending to be a cape, and he was dragging her and swirling her round. ‘I felt for all the world like a mop, and told him they wouldn’t need to clean the floor that night. We were both crying with laughter.
‘I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘You are making me laugh like my husband used to make me laugh’ – because that’s what I miss most about Mel, his sense of humour, his ability to never take a situation too seriously.’
In the early stages of navigating grief, like Annabel, those who have lost someone often feel guilty about laughing again. She agrees.
‘I did wonder if I should feel some guilt, but ultimately I know that Mel would not want me to feel unable to find any joy in life. I think what Strictly has done is give me the energy to look for the point in life. Music helps, and the physicality of it.
‘There is something freeing about dance. I did do ballet as a child, and I got to the stage where I remembered how it made me feel then. Tennis took over for me, and it’s different. It’s gladiatorial. Dance is… freeing.’
A standing ovation for Johannes, then? ‘He should be available on prescription from the NHS,’ she agrees. ‘And I think my children want him to move in with us. They adored him, and he them. It sounds twee but he really has become part of the family.’
She says she read Johannes’s autobiography when they had started training, as she lay in the bath soothing her aching muscles, ‘because I wanted to understand him’, and something in it chimed.
She speaks of the loneliness of life on the international tennis circuit – which she experienced before she met Mel – and finding an echo of it in Johannes’s description of the single-mindedness of the dance pro. ‘His life has been about dancing, so it was lovely to bring him into the family. I was never going to have it any other way.’
Is it true you even offered to do his washing for him?
‘I did. He would come for dinner and I worried about when he would do his life admin, because while we contestants have Sundays off the professionals have to choreograph the next week’s routines.
‘I said, ‘Bring a bag of washing and I can stick it in the machine and then the drier, like I would for my son.’ He didn’t take me up on it, but I meant it. He said no one had ever offered to do his washing before.’
Annabel has the slightly dazed air of a woman who has been through the spin cycle herself. Physically, she reckons she’s ‘in better shape than I have ever been’, which is saying something given her sporting background. Mentally? ‘It’s been life changing,’ she says. ‘I’ve had to find a strength I didn’t know I had. But it’s been exhausting, exhilarating, frustrating. I think I’ve been through every emotion possible.’
I catch up with her fresh from Strictly rehearsals. Although she was out of the contest, she was taking part in the group dance in last night’s final. ‘It will be the last dance with Johannes,’ she says, ‘so it’s going to be emotional.’
One of the most remarkable things about Annabel is her sheer emotional honesty.
As she chats about what she has learnt from Strictly, it becomes clear that she continued to weep her way through training.
‘It’s still not something I can control,’ she admits.
‘Some days I’d be blindsided by a piece of music or a particular memory, or I’d be showing someone a picture of Mel and find myself losing it. Other days I’d be able to just chat about him.
‘It’s unpredictable, grief, but I think I understand it a little more now. I think Johannes does too, which helped.
‘He lost his father when he was young, and his aunt – who inspired his dancing – a few years ago. And more recently her son, his cousin, died. Sometimes he didn’t have to say anything.’
How to define the relationship between Annabel and Johannes? Even she finds it tricky. She points out that she’s spent more hours with him over the past weeks than she probably will with her best friends in a lifetime. ‘So with Johannes it’s like a fast-tracked friendship, which means you are either going to clash or get very close very fast.’
Ditto with the physical proximity. ‘Johannes pointed out once that I am his perfect partner, physically, because of my size and shape.
‘When we are in hold we just fit together, and he was always trying to get me to understand the idea that we would move together, as one.
‘One of the things he’d say was, ‘It’s just you and me out there, and we will bring everyone to us. It is not us dancing for them. They will come to us.’ ‘
Some women might baulk at having to be this close with a near stranger, but Annabel points out two things.
First, she’s a sportsperson: ‘I look on the body the way any athlete does. I’m fascinated by what it can do, and I’m not embarrassed about anything like that.’
Secondly, Johannes is gay: ‘So there isn’t an issue there, although I can see why that sort of intimacy could be an issue’.
There were always three people in this partnership, though. As Johannes got to know Annabel and her quirks, he also got to know her late husband.
Before their tear-jerker of a couple’s choice dance, in week seven, Annabel took Johannes to Richmond Park, the ‘happy place’ she and Mel had visited every day when he was ill. ‘Every day we’d just walk, then sit on a bench and watch the wildlife.’
She says she was astounded when Johannes based that dance routine around a park bench.
The public response floored her. ‘We had thousands of messages, from people who had experienced loss, or who understood.
‘Grief can feel like a very lonely thing, but then you realise that there are a lot of people who have been through similar, or who are going through similar.’
She won’t be drawn on who she thinks will win the Glitterball Trophy in last night’s final, saying only that all the remaining competitors were ‘worthy finalists, who deserve their place’.
What next for her? Mel’s suits will still have to be dealt with.
‘Maybe all that has just been stalled,’ she says, ‘but at the same time my grief has certainly come out in all this. I would never have been able to stop that.’
A true test will come next year when her daughter, Amber, gets married. ‘Her getting engaged was bittersweet, and it will be so difficult to get through the day knowing that Mel should have been there.’
I suspect ‘that magical man’ Johannes may be getting an invite.
It was Annabel’s husband Mel’s wish to raise funds for research on the metabolic health of people with cancer. To donate, go to gofundme.com/f/support-forever-young-groups-research
James Parker is a UK-based entertainment aficionado who delves into the glitz and glamour of the entertainment industry. From Hollywood to the West End, he offers readers an insider’s perspective on the world of movies, music, and pop culture.
