It is a month since Ore Oduba was crowned the winner of Strictly Come Dancing in front of a record-breaking audience of 11.8 million, and Oduba has yet to come down to earth. He hangs in mid-air as he does a heel-click jump, kicking upwards and outwards, Fred Astaire in Nike athleisure, with a radiant smile to camera as his trainers tap together in space. And then he does it again, and again and again, every time the photographer gives the nod. Every Strictly show ends with a vow to “keeeeep dancing”, and Oduba is keeping that dream alive.
Strictly has transcended television to become part of the UK’s national conversation. We love the dancing, we love the drama – and we love the fact that under all that fake tan is a show with a heart.
I say “we”. I mean “I”, obviously. I love Strictly. I don’t mean in an ironic, channel-hopping-between-Netflix-dramas-for-social-media-lols kind of love, but an old-school week-in-week-out, sofa-date love. So here I am, hopelessly star struck, in a basement dance studio in north London where Oduba is rehearsing for 30 performances on the Strictly live tour. I am soon out-fan-girled by the show’s winner on his Strictly journey: “The whole thing was perfect, from start to finish.” It was “a privilege” and “an exhilarating time”. Host Tess Daly is “so loving”, her sidekick Claudia Winkleman is “a total star”. Even tough-love judge Craig Revel Horwood is “one of the loveliest guys I know”. I half expect bluebirds to start flitting around Oduba’s head.
“I only ever had two dreams,” he tells me. “First, to find and marry the girl of my dreams. Since I was about 11, I wanted to find someone to spend my life with because, if you can do that, so much good can come from it. And second, Strictly. Those were the two things I always dreamed about doing.” When Oduba won Strictly, it was in front of Portia, his wife of just over a year.
You could find all this excruciatingly winsome. But I find Oduba delightful and Strictly cheering in a world where such ambrosial charms are not easy to come by. There is plenty in modern life to make sneering unbelievers of us all. But if a Charleston can’t put a smile on your face, something is very wrong.
Oduba became, in four months, a phenomenal dancer. But his appeal to the Strictly audience drew on his lack of dance training (the British public love an underdog) and an endearing tendency to cry. Not decorative eye-dabbing, but the real deal: sniffing, heaving, sobbing.
In person, he is an intriguing mix of soppiness and steel. He has said that he cried from 11am on his wedding day until 2am the following morning, and emotion is never far from the surface – his eyes get pretty shiny just talking about the Strictly final.
We move from the dance studio to a quiet room upstairs to chat. Before he sits down, he takes a T-shirt and jacket from his rucksack and folds them with a precision that would shame Marie Kondo. He shakes out each garment, lies it face down, folds it vertically into thirds like a triptych, and then horizontally in half. “I don’t like creases,” he explains. “I know what real OCD is like, and I don’t have that. But it’s fair to say I am a little bit compulsive.”
This perfectionist streak served Oduba well on Strictly. A BBC Sport presenter since graduating from children’s TV, he “knew about how the best sportsmen and women in the world get to be the best because they take the time to perfect their technique. How David Beckham would take a bag of footballs to practise free kicks, how Roger Federer would be on the tennis court practising the same stroke over and over again. In the first week on Strictly, I found myself in a dance studio with my dance partner Joanne [Clifton], who is a world champion, teaching me the tango. There was this one leg movement and she was just like – do it again. And again. Do it again. And you might think – that’s boring! Where’s all the flamboyance and excitement? But I loved it. Because I know that this is how you get to be amazing.” He adds: “Strictly is real, and that’s why people love it. Yes, it has sequins and glitter, but the emotion is real, and the hard work is real.”
There is something pure about Strictly, I suggest, precisely because it is pure fantasy. Perfect technique in the Viennese waltz has no monetary value in the global celebrity economy. The show is a bubble in which excellence is prized for its own sake.
The instant before stepping on to the dancefloor, Oduba says, “feels like being a gladiator in the Colosseum. There are no actual lions, but it’s pretty scary.” The camaraderie between the contestants is, he insists, real. The class of 2016 was, he says, “an unlikely mob. I knew Greg [Rutherford] and Claudia [Fragapane] through sporting circles, but none of the others. But we bonded fast. I have this memory from Blackpool, of hugging Ed Balls really tight on the dance floor. That’s a picture I never would have been able to even imagine.”
Balls, the gruff ex-shadow chancellor turned Gangnam Style-dancing populist hero was the unlikely star of the series. In an autumn chilled by Brexit fallout and dominated by a presidential election of unprecedented tonal harshness and vulgarity, Balls’s commitment to the Strictly project and breathtaking lack of personal vanity became, in a strange way, a reminder that sincerity and decency can still exist in politics. Balls was, says Oduba, “the life of the party. People gravitated towards him. He would tell gags, sing in the makeup chair. He was just such a warm person that people wanted to spend time with him. And it was incredible to be part of this totally unexpected public conversation about him. I always loved that about Strictly, that the audience take ownership of it because that’s what makes it a national event.”
Before doing Strictly, Oduba “loved moving and grooving, but as I had never learned to dance, I didn’t think for a second that I could win. So, at the start, it wasn’t so much about competition for me, as about the opportunity to learn.” He and Clifton trained all day from Monday to Friday, recorded the programme on Saturday, sometimes training again on Sunday. “It was unbelievably intense. Sometimes I’d get to the end of a nine-hour day and realise I hadn’t been to the toilet. I mean, I literally hadn’t peed all day.”
A week before Christmas, Oduba went into the final with the bookies putting his odds at 7/1, behind Danny Mac and Louise Redknapp. “I kept thinking about that sporting cliche of not playing the occasion but playing the game. I knew I had to keep my emotion in check. And I honestly still didn’t think we would win. Then, all of a sudden, that changed. We won.”
His triumph was an unexpected ending to a series beset in its early stages by accusations of racism among the voting public. The diversity of the contestants was undermined when, in the first three weeks, the departure of two black celebrities, presenter Melvin Odoom and actor Tameka Empson, was followed by that of Naga Munchetty, who is of Indian heritage. What was Oduba’s take on this row? “The great thing about Strictly is that it creates a national conversation. If it gets people talking about stuff, that’s great. But I was in the show, and so I was in a bubble where I didn’t have to think about it. It didn’t come into my thinking at all. Even at this point, I have no thoughts about it.”
I was expecting this answer. Being Strictly champion makes Oduba the nation’s sweetheart, a privileged position for an ambitious young man, which he is not about to jeopardise by being even mildly outspoken. But still, I try one more time. Does he feel now that his winning answers the race question? “No, because it still hasn’t occurred to me. It hasn’t entered my thinking at all.” He takes a large bite of his breakfast baguette and chews it extra slowly, just in case I hadn’t got the message that this particular issue was closed.
Ore Oduba was born 31 years ago in London to Nigerian parents. His father Jim, a lawyer, has since divided his time between the two countries, while his mother Fola lives in Dorset where Oduba attended the independent Canford School, before studying sport science and social science at Loughborough University. (One of his sisters, Lola, works at the Guardian.) Having set his sights on a television career while still a student, Oduba joined the Newsround team straight after graduation in 2008. Before Strictly, his career was already on a healthy trajectory, with guest presenting spots on The One Show and Rio covering the 2016 Olympics for BBC4.
The hardest part of Strictly, he says, wasn’t learning the Fred and Ginger inspired showdance or the dreaded dance off, but not being with his wife, whose job kept her in Manchester while Oduba spent the best part of the season in London. “And in our first year of marriage, I had already been away at the Olympics for a month and away with the football for three weeks.” An initial plan to rehearse in Manchester proved untenable, so time with Portia was limited to weekends, much of which was spent in the studio.
But the “Strictly curse”, as the high attrition rate of celebrity marriages is known, is not only about the logistics of time spent apart. This is a show in which success depends on a couple having an intensely close and very physical relationship, of successfully acting out stories of romance and seduction on the dancefloor. How did his wife handle it? “She coped incredibly, and I have never for a moment taken it for granted because it must have been really difficult. She was amazing. She never once doubted me. I was doubly lucky with Jo, because not only did I immediately find a friend with her, my wife did, too. And because they got on, I was free to get on with the dancing.”
Ore has a new partner on the tour in Karen – Jo’s sister-in-law. (The emotional intensity of the Strictly “family”, as it is often referred to, mirrors the tightly interwoven world of professional ballroom.) Oduba can’t wait. “I need this tour. I have had serious Strictly withdrawal. Because when it ends, it ends just like that – bam – like hitting a wall. Crash.”
After Christmas with family and friends, Ore and Portia left the glitterball trophy at Portia’s mum’s house and headed to Malaysia on holiday. There has been talk of a £500,000 bidding war, of BBC bosses worried that Oduba will follow Susanna Reid’s example and use Strictly as a jumping off point into the more lucrative waters of ITV.
When I ask about his plans, he says: “It’s quite exciting to say that I don’t know where it’s all going to lead. I have always been quite driven and strategic about my career, and, historically, Strictly opens doors so I know this is only going to help. This is a huge deal for me, and there are a few things in the pipeline.”
He would also love to find a way to incorporate his newfound passion for dance into his life, so I suggest that he apply for the position of Strictly judge vacated by the retiring Len Goodman. “I’m not going to be a judge. Let’s nip that in the bud,” he says.
Time to go. Together, we gather up the cups and paper plates and tidy the room, just because it seems like the nice, Strictly-ish thing to do. On the way out, we pass the studio where the professional dancers are already rehearsing. “Five, six, seven, eight!” the choreographer shouts, as Karen and Kevin, Aljaz and Oksana whirl around the floor. I only realise I am pressing my nose right up against the glass when Revel Horwood, lounging on the other side of the room, spots me and raises a perfectly arched eyebrow in trademark amused disapproval. My day is made.
The Strictly Come Dancing live show tours across the UK from 20 January to 12 February
