Brendan Cole is busy, busy, busy. With the second tour of his extraordinarily successful Live and Unjudged show under way and a July wedding to plan for, the Antipodean dancer hardly has time to catch his breath. Nora McElhone chatted to him post-rehearsal to get an insight into his new show.
The bad boy of Strictly Come Dancing is in fact relaxed and happy to chat about his introduction to ballroom dancing, getting involved in Strictly and his own stage show.
Growing up in New Zealand, dancing probably wasn’t an obvious choice for a six-year-old boy and it was Brendan’s mother who dragged him along to classes. He believes his naturally competitive spirit helped him to get hooked.
Once he left school, the glamour of his amateur dancing career was juxtaposed with a day job as a roofer until a trip to London in preparation for a world championship inspired him to make the decision to turn professional.
“I saw people in London that I looked up to, that we only saw on tape and I thought ‘I’m going to give it a crack’.” Showing the determination that has marked his rise as a ballroom dancer, Brendan was back in the UK two years later, set on earning his living as a professional.
He turned professional in 2000, and London has been his home ever since he first arrived aged 19.
“I do miss New Zealand up to a point. I do consider myself a Kiwi but I get to go home once a year and I see more of the country now than I ever did.”
It was Strictly Come Dancing that really propelled Brendan Cole into the limelight. He is one of a small number of dancers to have taken part in all seven series of the primetime reality show and has also appeared in Celebrity Love Island, It Takes Two and is on the judging panel of New Zealand’s version of Strictly, Dancing with the Stars.
To his credit, Brendan and his then dance partner and fiancee Camilla Dallerup saw the potential in the Celebrity Come Dancing concept when other dancers didn’t.
“A lot of people in the dancing world didn’t like the idea,” he recalls. “Nobody assumed that it was going to be so successful.”
It is the luck of the draw whether you are paired with a budding twinkletoes or someone with two incurable left feet and with a comment that seems particularly pertinent for a dancer who has (rightly or wrongly) been romantically linked with more than one of his Strictly partners, he points out the pairings are “like a blind date that could go horribly wrong”.
Brendan puts the show’s runaway success down to the fact that it is “good old family entertainment. All the generations can watch it. People love to see the chemistry between the dancers the really good and the really bad.
“The nice thing about being part of the show is the people who are in it get on really well. Until it gets down to the nitty gritty at the end!”
Although he is careful to make the distinction between what the celebrity contestants achieve and the standards required to sustain a career as a professional dancer, Brendan admits “it’s quite something to see what they do. At the end you realise that they don’t know that much they have learned to do a particular dance but it is a cool thing to see how they get to grips with it.”
If you loved getting to know Brendan in Strictly then his own show, Live and Unjudged, will be right up your street. Despite feeling the pressure of bringing his own creation to an audience with extremely high expectations, he is proud of the finished article.
“I think it is a lot harder (than facing the Strictly judging panel). The name says ‘Live and Unjudged’ but it is judged. People are sitting there wanting to be entertained. It’s quite different but I love it it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Brendan Cole Live and Unjudged comes to The Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on Sunday, June 6. For ticket information visit the website or phone the box office on 0131 5296000