Bill Bailey has caused a storm after admitting to having dance lessons as a teenager.
The comedian has confessed to undergoing “ballroom dancing lessons” as a youngster and learning “the waltz, the foxtrot and the quickstep,” according to the Daily Mirror.
He's starring in this year's Strictly Come Dancing, which has tough rules around all contestants being novices on the dance floor.
Writing in his new book, the 55-year-old said: “When I was a teenager I had ballroom dancing lessons. There was a dance school across the road from our house and I learned the waltz, the foxtrot and the quickstep.”
In previous years Strictly had defended contestants with apparent dance experience by saying they didn’t have “ballroom or Latin” experience.
But in this case Bill is all set to compete on the BBC show, where he has been partnered with previous champion Oti Mabuse.
In his book – called Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness - the star added of his lessons: “The teacher was a tiny, petite woman with a huge passion for The Dance.
"It was a marvellous and quite surreal experience to whirl around a dance hall with this ball of terpsichorean energy.
"Bless her and all those she must have enlightened to her world. I can see the appeal of the foxtrot, the tango, the rhumba, the formal nature of it all, the practised moved, the precision, but it’s not really me.”
A Strictly source defended Bill’s inclusion in the BBC show despite having ballroom training.
The insider stressed he only had two lessons and that it was 40 years ago.
The source said: “If he was joining Strictly straight after having had ballroom lessons as a teenager, or he had a professional ballroom background, it would have been very different. There is no hard and fast rule – it’s all on a case by case basis.”
Judge Motsi Mabuse has already said how she expects Bill to be a surprise package on the show.
“And I think there are going to be a few surprises, and they will be Jamie Laing, and I think Bill Bailey will surprise us too,” she said last week.
Born in Keysham, Bill went to King Edward’s School and played his first stand up gig as a teenager at Moles nightclub in Bath.
It comes as the Mirror revealed how Caroline Quentin, 60, had years of dance training before switching to acting, Caroline said: “I was a precociously good dancer. Hard to imagine looking at me now. The school I went to, it was a bit like the Royal Ballet school.
“I wasn’t sent to meet the right people, I was there to learn to dance, which is really painful and tiring.”
