FERN BRITTON: My Strictly accomplice instructed me I had no stability and could not dance. Some days I used to be crying earlier than I even acquired to rehearsals. The TV star tells her bombshell story

My middle names are Gung and Ho – if you give me a challenge, I’ll just do it – but when Strictly Come Dancing came my way in 2012, I was nervous.

My partner, a handsome Russian, was an incredible dancer but I knew he would shoot from the hip.

Shortly after we were partnered live on air, I found him sitting on the steps where the band play. I asked him if he was OK with having me as a partner and he said: ‘Well, I am used to someone with some dance ability, and younger.’

My confidence took a hit at that, but I laughed and told him I didn’t feel 55, and that, when I had a drink in me, I was a sensational dancer. He did not laugh.

When rehearsals began, he soon pointed out that I had no balance and couldn’t dance, so I should just stand still while he danced around me.

Strictly is a magnificent sausage machine. You go in one end as a fairly normal person and come out the other as a bedazzling, sequined goddess.

It was the rehearsals that were challenging. As the weeks went on, I found it increasingly hard to gather up my self-confidence and there were days I was crying before I even got into the rehearsal room.

I started to worry I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome as I would do anything to try to please my dance partner.

He sometimes showed his frustration. Late one evening, when I simply couldn’t get the steps in my head and we were both tired, he looked at me and said: ‘Go home before I kill you.’ It was a joke. I laughed. ‘Kill me, please.’

In week six, we danced the salsa, for which I wore a fluffy, flouncy pink number. These costumes are built around a leotard with a bra sewn in, so you’re safe in the knowledge everything is securely stowed away. That night we scored 27 points, the most we’d ever achieved – but it was also the night we went out of the competition. When it’s your time, it’s your time.

Finally my partner said to me: ‘Well, you did everything I asked of you.’ Hearing that felt like I had received the glitterball.

Soon afterwards, we started the five-week Strictly tour. We danced the salsa and my favourite, the Viennese waltz, for which I wore a long, iron-grey chiffon dress that was swishy and smothered in crystals, with a feather boa trim around the bottom; a nightmare for quick changes but a joy to behold.

I never quite nailed the group dances, but performing at the O2 in front of 20,000 people, as well as other huge arenas plastered with giant screens, was exhilarating. There were two tour buses: one to transport the band between venues, and the other for the dancers and professionals.

I started on the dancers’ bus, where the air was thick with chatter about false eyelashes and heels. But I felt like an outsider and after a few days I asked if I could join the band on their bus instead. They laughed, saying: ‘We wondered how long it would be before you joined us.’

What a different vibe! The musicians had fine wines and cheese and artisan bread for the journey.

The whole experience was something of an endurance test, which has made me all the more resilient. I used every TV trick in the book to lift myself up: a good spray tan, some sequins and a pair of false eyelashes, and I ended up thinking: ‘I’m pretty f*****g good actually!’

That bravado almost deserted me in 2018, when my agent told me I’d been offered a role in the touring production of Calendar Girls.

I said: ‘Absolutely no.’ After all, I’m not an actress. I wasn’t going to do it, so that was that. The following week Gary Barlow, who’d written the music for the show, asked me to have coffee with him. It was lovely to be invited, so I said yes – but I was going to drink the coffee, have a chat and give him a firm no.

On the day, it turned out not to be just Gary and me and a takeaway latte. Instead I found myself in front of the writer, director, casting director and producer, with a script in my hand, reading a scene.

Weirdly, they offered me the job and, perhaps even more inexplicably, I said yes. I was flattered into it, but it absolutely tested my confidence – to breaking point.

One day, during rehearsals, the director said to me: ‘I’m thinking of letting you go because you can read the script well sitting down, but you can’t do it standing up.’

He meant I couldn’t do acting, I thought to myself. Somehow I kept the job, but he was right: I’m not a natural actress.

I did try to get it right, but there was a terrible day when the director declared: ‘It’s just too technical for you,’ when all I had to do in that scene was sit on a chair!

The cast were forgiving of my endless errors. I appreciated their support and it was worth it in the end because I made three great friends among them. And it was a big lesson in owning the mistakes you make – and just keep going by digging very, very deep…

There are times in everyone’s lives when the s*** hits the fan.

The good news, I discovered when it happened to me, is how enduring the worst of times gives us the energy to survive.

Hitting my 60s, I was certainly going to need all the resilience I could muster: I was 61 when my mother died, 62 when my father – the actor Tony Britton – died, and 63 when my second marriage, which started the race so well, faded before the expected finish line and died.

Some months before the Covid pandemic, my then husband and I sat down at the kitchen table and had the discussion. We had reached the end of our shared road. Life as a couple had been wonderful, exciting, fulfilling, and we’d shared many happy times. He brought a lot into my life and I brought a lot into his. But when it’s over, it’s over.

I got through it all, I think, by looking forward, not seeing only what was right under my nose but looking beyond and thinking: ‘It’ll be fine by next week, next month, next year.’

It might not be the best way, but it’s the only way I could do it.

I am a great believer in putting one foot in front of another and repeat. I hear my mum’s voice telling me: ‘This too will pass.’ So, I just focused on what was ahead. In general, I rarely look back. I just keep going.

I was an orphan and facing being single again. So, I wasn’t fine. But I was able to count my blessings, and I had many. I had my four children, I had my health and I had a house in Cornwall – my refuge, which I had bought many years before as our holiday home.

I can’t remember what thoughts I had as I got out of the car after that long journey down, but I do remember the house welcoming me, giving me a hug of security and a sense of peace.

I had always thought that my husband and I would make it our permanent home. A place to share, together, once the children had left school. And now, here I was, single, looking at a very different future to the one I had imagined. This was not how it was meant to be.

This wasn’t my first experience of rebuilding a life: I’d already been through two marriages and two careers – one as a television presenter/journalist, one as a fiction writer.

But I could do it all over again. I could and would create a new sense of belonging and a fresh chapter of my personal history… once I’d taken a few deep breaths and the earth beneath my feet had stopped buckling.

And then lockdown happened. While the sun shone daily and those of us who had nothing to do spent our days revelling in the silence of zero aeroplanes and traffic, I can see now that, although I believed I was handling my grief and the pain of my divorce well, I really wasn’t.

I stopped doing all the things I was used to doing. Writing, keeping fit, getting up with the lark. Even changing my clothes, showering and cleaning my teeth all became things of the past. To this unhealthy mixture I began to add too much wine, too much chocolate and a new hobby: smoking.

It took about two years before I could see what it was doing to me and that I didn’t like it. I looked old. I’d grown fat. I was unfit. My knees hurt. Climbing stairs left me breathless.

All the energy I had been so proud of – going to the gym, cycling, spinning, swimming, running – had packed its cases and left. I hated my lifestyle and I didn’t much like me or my body. Things had to change.

So, how did I get back on track? It was when I met the surgeon who was going to give me a new shoulder. If he was going to help me, I was going to help him by getting fitter in readiness for the op.

I knew the waiting list was a year long so I had no excuse. Out went the cigarettes and on went the running shoes. I became evangelistic about doing Couch To 5k (the NHS‘s running programme for beginners).

Soon, I was jogging just a few minutes more each time and my legs were getting stronger. I realised the trick was to stick to the plan and not to get ahead of myself. By building up gradually, I amazed myself that soon I could run for 30 minutes.

As for food, well, we all know the rules, don’t we? Protein in the form of eggs, cheese, yogurt, chicken, etc., to keep our ageing muscles strong. As many vegetables as you like (did you know, broccoli is a good source of protein?), fruit and water.

Eating properly again, coupled with the running, meant that I once again found the feeling of satiety, the thing in your brain that tells you that you are full. I’d been first class at overriding that for quite a while.

It was around this time I remembered a conversation I once had with a friend about how women’s fashion is all about ’empowerment’. This really irked me. Clothes gave women power? Women had no power unless it was gifted by a power suit? The more I thought about it, the more I raged. Poppycock and balls to that.

Then an alternative word popped into my head – ‘Repowering’. I checked my dictionary: it means restoring power to its original capacity, which really resonated with me.

Of course women are born with power, but somewhere along the line we begin to give our power away. As young girls we were told to sit nicely, speak softly, look pretty, work hard, expect less, be a bit more malleable and biddable.

Looking back now, I realise I’ve repowered several times in my life. Leaving home in my teens was me taking back my power from my controlling stepfather. When I changed career in my 20s from theatre to TV, I repowered myself with the confidence to say: ‘I can do this.’ 

When I was at the bottom of the dark pit of postnatal depression, I had to do it again, which led to my first divorce and the faith I had in building a new life as a single mother. And now in my 60s, orphaned and single and with big reasons to repower, I see that if I want to change my life, it is not the time to sit back in my rocking chair, watching the world pass me by.

Instead, it’s an opportunity to throw off the layers of characters we have cloaked ourselves in over the decades – e.g. ‘sensible’, ‘hardworking’, ‘perfect homemaker’, ‘intellectual’, etc. – and to reach back to our younger selves.

We knew how to have fun then. We were adventurous and bright and enjoyed life. That ‘you’ is still in there. Bring the best bits of her into your future. You may surprise yourself.

Whatever our age, this is our time and we shouldn’t be afraid to live it in exactly the way we want. We can find our power, pick it up like a prize – and use it.

Adapted from The Older I Get… by Fern Britton (Ebury Spotlight, £22), to be published on November 7. © Fern Britton 2024. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to November 9, 2024; UK P&P free on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.

Reasons to love being 60

The night before I turned 60, I searched in Google: ‘What can I get over 60?’

Here are some of the best things I found, as well as my own list of benefits:

• Once you get to 60, lots of discounts become available to you. Even the Boots Advantage Card is a thrill as, when you get to a certain age, they give you extra points.
• You have more time to sit and think.
• Holidays get way cheaper once you don’t have to go in term time.
• You can get a bus pass – and make sure you choose a fabulous photo of yourself for it. I used an incredibly flattering one of me from a magazine shoot!
• Once you hit 60, your prescriptions are free.
• You can watch daytime TV like Bargain Hunt and Homes Under The Hammer without being judged.
• You don’t have so many responsibilities.
• You can get others to do the things you don’t want to do, with the words: ‘Oh, if only someone could help me with…’ It’s called weaponised incompetence and I’m all for it.
• You care less about what other people think.
• You’re still alive!

Learn to rebuff negativity

If I see a bad review or something horrible written about me, all the good things I’ve achieved are as nothing and I start to beat myself up. Why is it we only ever remember the negative stuff?

Here’s a fine example. As a woman on television your entire being is discussed. Once, a male columnist – let’s not be coy, his name is Tony Parsons – wrote that I looked ‘like Moby Dick in a blonde wig… Who really wants to see this obese old slapper wagging her enormous breasts at the camera?’

Tony! I hope no one, man or woman, writes similarly about your own daughter.