“Shut your gob and get on with it,” says Shirley Ballas. Time is obviously a precious commodity, as she rushes between appointments and meetings in the week the Strictly Come Dancing line-up has been announced ahead of the new series, which starts on 20 September. But the show’s head judge is not being rude; far from it. She’s just happily running through a few of the no-nonsense Northern aphorisms that introduce the chapters in her new book, Best Foot Forward: Life Lessons from the World of Dance.
Her latest book (she also has a successful line in cosy crime novels) is, she explains, a “continuation” of her 2020 autobiography Behind the Sequins: My Life. “I didn’t have the confidence back then to write some of the things that I’ve written now,” she says. “I’ve written about what’s happened in my life recently, but I’ve brought in a few other stories as well. I wanted it to be a collection of life lessons in confidence, resilience and self-belief, inspired by the world of dance.”
In response to all the above, and with no intention of living with a partner again, she has joined the exclusive members-only dating app Raya (“The age bracket I’ve gone for is fairly broad, but not too young. I reckon anything from 55 to 70 if they’re fit. Up to 98 if they’re loaded!” she jokes), looked fear in the face and, she reveals in her book, started bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) to counter the effects of the menopause and begin “to feel like my old self again.” Confidence, resilience and self-belief? Check.
“Maybe because of social media, people tend to be happy to talk about their feelings. It wasn’t that way when I was younger, everything was a little bit more bottled-up, even more so in my mother’s era. She still can’t understand why I talk about some of the things I do in the book.” Ballas smiles, before following her own advice from the “Adaptability” chapter – or “step” as she calls them – to “Master the Transitions” and talk about the death of her brother David, who took his own life in 2003.
She is now a passionate advocate for mental health awareness and a supporter of the charities CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and Suicide&Co. She discusses this in the “Survival” step, “Accept the Rise and Fall” – something you experience with the waltz and foxtrot. Did she ever consider dance as a form of therapy in itself? “I’ve been dancing since I was two years old,” she explains. “So it wouldn’t necessarily be therapeutic for me, but when David died I did just get on with the dancing.”
As her mother Audrey puts it, “You can’t go back and start a new beginning, but you can write a new ending”.
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