Chris McCausland won the 2024 series of Strictly Come Dancing with professional partner Dianne Buswell, but the pair faced a number of challenges during their time on the show
Comedian Chris McCausland‘s triumph on last year’s Strictly Come Dancing came despite numerous obstacles – but not all of them were related to the Liverpool-born comedian’s retinitis pigmentosa, which robbed him of his sight almost entirely in his early twenties.
Indeed, he reveals, even if he’d retained his vision, he might have lost it regardless during rehearsal sessions for the programme.
While Chris and professional dance partner Dianne Buswell were rehearsing their Samba for Halloween Week, the Australian professional dancer, who is expecting her first child with boyfriend Joe Sugg, kicked backwards a touch too vigorously.
Chris remembers that the dancer “caught me so hard in the face that I almost threw up and had to lie down for twenty minutes to recover”.
In his new autobiography, Keep Laughing, he continues: “I took the entire impact of her flying foot right on one eyeball. It’s honestly a good job they didn’t work already or I would have been doing that dance half blind anyway and Strictly would have had an insurance payout like no other.”
But the biggest challenge to the dancing pair wasn’t Chris’ condition, but Dianne’s.
Their apparently effortless Week Eight Couple’s Choice routine to John Lennon’s 1970 classic Instant Karma masked a hidden crisis.
The dramatic performance featured a sudden blackout which, Chris reveals, was intended to transport the studio audience and BBC viewers into his world of darkness. It was an extraordinary television moment, and both the programme’s judges and fans had an enormous emotional reaction.
However, what nobody else realised was that Dianne had been genuinely struggling in the lead-up to the live programme.
Chris revealed: “The only downside to this dance for us was that Dianne had been really ill all day, so we hadn’t been able to enjoy it as much as we would have liked.”
Dianna had been battling a stomach bug, and Chris quipped that the daring moment when the stage lights returned after the blackout to show him spinning rapidly with Dianne draped across his shoulders could have had some very nasty outcomes.
He penned: “She had been unable to keep anything down and had spent a lot of that day in or near a toilet, so we were just grateful that it was only the pyrotechnics that went off, or that fast spin out of the darkness could have been a very different surprise!”.
The routine earned thunderous applause from the crowd and a score of 33 out of a potential 40 points from the judging panel – Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse, Shirley Ballas and Anton Du Beke.
Craig declared the “poignant blackout moment” was “absolutely spectacular” whilst head judge Shirley became tearful and, as she composed herself, told Chris: “You come out every week with your heart on your sleeve, and you give us 100%.”
He revealed that if medical science were to find a cure for his blindness one day, he would first look up some video clips from his time on Strictly: “I’ll certainly have to sit down with Dianne, to watch our dances and actually see what we were able to accomplish each week.”
