Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman are hanging up their dancing shoes. After presiding over the Strictly Come Dancing ballroom for 21 and 11 years respectively, the presenting duo will depart the show when the current season ends in December, they confirmed today in a video shared on Instagram.
With Claud dressed in black and Tess in white, like a sort of light entertainment yin and yang, the colleagues said that they’d decided that the time was right to pass on the “very sparkly baton” to new blood. “We have loved working as a duo, and hosting Strictly has been an absolute dream,” they said in a joint statement that accompanied their video. “We were always going to leave together and now feels like the right time.”
Of all the Strictly Come Dancing curveballs we’ve been thrown in recent times, this somehow feels like the most shocking. Sure, the past few seasons have been blighted by bullying accusations, high-profile BBC inquiries, a knotty controversy surrounding the former GoCompare opera singer Wynne Evans, and, this year, even an investigation into alleged drug use by two stars. And yet, despite all the handwringing (some of it, admittedly, from me) and gleeful prognostications about an impending Strictly downfall, those stories never really seemed to actually impact what happened on Saturday nights. The show would always go on, in large part thanks to Daly and Winkleman’s consummate professionalism.
This very wholesome leave-taking, though, will mark the biggest shake-up that the show has seen in a decade or so. Daly has been part of Strictly since day one, initially hired as a thirty-something to work alongside entertainment veteran Bruce Forsyth. Winkleman, meanwhile, has been involved for almost as long: she was hired to host the weeknightly companion show It Takes Two in 2004, after the success of Strictly’s debut season, then stepped up to the main programme in 2014, after Forsyth’s departure.
The pair have the sort of easy rapport that’s only forged through years of working together in the stress-inducing crucible of primetime live TV, underpinned by a genuine friendship; watching them, you always get the sense that they’re probably sharing goss when their microphones are switched off.
As a double act, their personalities gel well, too. Winkleman’s wackiness probably wouldn’t work on a show as traditional as Strictly without Daly as her more sensible foil, whereas Daly feels warmer and looser as a presenter when she’s around Winkleman. Even their Saturday night style seemed to be a case of opposites attract, with Winkleman’s monochrome, often androgynous get-ups offsetting Daly’s sparkly gowns.
The pair have done an admirable job steering the show over uncertain terrain recently, but despite the initial shock factor of their jointly announced departure, it’s not too difficult to see why they felt the time was right to dance their last dance. Working on a TV colossus like Strictly through the pandemic and then having to grin through a whirl of bad publicity and speculation must have been exhausting.
Winkleman’s wackiness probably wouldn’t work on a show as traditional as ‘Strictly’ without Daly as her more sensible foil
Winkleman’s career outside Strictly has only gone from strength to strength at the same time, thanks to the success of The Traitors. Recently, she’s successfully filled in for Graham Norton on his Friday night chat show, and I imagine that TV commissioners watched her do so with interest. Daly’s next steps feel less certain, but perhaps, after more than two decades, she just wants her winter Saturday nights back. Now, the big question hanging over the show (aside from the matter of whether the Clauditorium will have to be formally re-named) is who could possibly replace them?
Surely the Strictly execs are being bombarded by phone calls from the agents of some of broadcasting’s biggest names right now, although I can’t help but think it’s probably the last thing that the show’s beleaguered team want to deal with right now: recently Tess and Claud have felt like a dependable point of stability amid all the Strictly turmoil.
There will be speculation that It Takes Two hosts Janette Manrara and Fleur East will be in line for the job (in fact, the bookies have already started taking bets) but I’m not entirely convinced that they have the experience. Despite all the recent mess, Strictly remains the jewel in the BBC’s crown, and it needs a very steady pair of hands to steer it. Zoe Ball, a past It Takes Two host, could be a solid choice, but the presenter has also made a conscious choice to step back from high-profile gigs over the past few years; she may well not want the stress that inevitably comes with such a role.
It’ll certainly be difficult to recreate this twosome’s easy chemistry, not least at a time when Strictly feels like it’s on slightly shakier ground than usual. And yet part of the show’s magic is the fact that it doesn’t necessarily rely on one person (or two people) to make it work; it’s very much a group effort.
Big characters, from the judging panel (Bruno! Len!) and from the cohort of professional dancers (Oti! Kevin!), have left before, and it hasn’t necessarily diminished Strictly’s appeal. And so while Tess and Claud’s goodbye certainly marks the end of an era (and a very dazzling one at that), it’s certainly not a death knell for this ever-resilient show. Perhaps this double departure will prove the catalyst to give Strictly a proper makeover (one that involves more than just spray tans).
