‘Relentless’: Strictly favourite Lewis Cope on what it’s really like to dance on TV ...Middle East

Lewis Cope, the hot favourite to win this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, has a real-life storyline better than any work of fiction. Growing up in working-class Hartlepool with 13 siblings, most of whom were into boxing, Cope instead chose to flex his jazz hands and enter the world of showbiz.

To make such an origin story even more compelling, as the grandson of a miner, he became a real-life Billy Elliot, making his performing debut in the West End production at the tender age of 11.

All of which makes Cope a prime target for the usual backlash about how people with dance experience shouldn’t dare show their faces on Strictly.

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“First of all, if you look at the contestants over the years, I don’t think that’s ever been a rule,” he responds now. “But, also, I’ve done no training as a dancer. I’m definitely not a professional. I guess it’s a bit of a compliment that people are calling me one.”

He is at pains to point out that he was not accomplished enough at dancing to bag himself the lead role in the aforementioned Billy Elliot, the part that set him on course for an acting career in the likes of Vera and Emmerdale.

“I wasn’t good enough to play Billy, so I played his mate Michael – I did one tap dance on stage, that was it. After that, I was in a hip-hop dance crew for a couple of years, but we were just six lads from Hartlepool in an amateur group. Then I went to train as an actor for three years, and that’s what I’ve been doing since.”

It is fair to say, though, that dancing suits him well. Cope’s routines with his pro partner Katya Jones have been a triumph. Their Halloween couple’s choice not only got Craig Revel Horwood flashing that lesser-spotted 10 paddle (leading to the first full 40 score of this series), but it will go down in Strictly legend as one of the most astonishingly brilliant, flawless performances ever on the show, with viewers everywhere hitting the rewind button again and again for another marvel at its excellence.

“Everyone said the same thing to me – that they have to keep watching it. But it wasn’t just us. Everything seemed to work so well: the set design, the lighting, the costumes, the band. We didn’t know how special it would be. When you’re rehearsing, you don’t get that sort of energy. It didn’t really all come together until right before we did it.”

We are talking after a day in the rehearsal studio ahead of tonight’s Blackpool extravaganza, always a landmark week in the Strictly calendar. Cope is on his way home to put up his blistered feet alongside his Pilates instructor partner, Rachel Maya Lopez, to distract himself over a few episodes of Bake Off.

“We do a full day, from 8am-5pm non-stop, going over the choreography, videoing it, going back over it, trying to clean it up, so obviously you’re knackered and should be able to switch off, but for some reason you can’t. You’re wired. Everywhere you go, everything you do, you’re thinking of the steps,” he says.

Cope and Jones’s dance and music combo for Blackpool is quite the pairing – a Charleston to Arctic Monkeys’ indie masterpiece “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”. “I’ve been looking forward to doing a Charleston, I just like the look of it, and I was like: ‘This song is very rocky, how are we gonna do it?’ But it’s a bit more of a jazzed-up version and now it all makes sense. There are certain weeks and certain styles that sit better for your body, and I think that Charleston is one of those for me.”

How are the nerves holding up this week? “Blackpool is a new venue, a new layout and apparently, the floor is a lot bigger and has a bit of a spring to it. But, you know, I never really get nervous; it’s more excitement,” he considers.

“I’ve put my whole trust in Katya as a choreographer, as a teacher, as a dance partner and, from the beginning, we said: ‘Let’s spend the week doing as much as we can, making sure there’s no stone unturned, and that we’ve embodied the full dance over and over and over again.’ I don’t think it’s helpful for me to think there are 10, 15 million people watching, so I just kind of block the audience out, block the cameras out.”

Initially, Cope wasn’t even meant to be on the show, but was drafted in at the 11th hour when actor Kristian Nairn (Hodor from Game of Thrones) withdrew for health reasons. As such, he is still finding the whole thing quite mind-blowing. “I think I’m mostly running on adrenaline. I started saying: ‘We’ll take one week at a time,’ and then it was one day at a time, and now it’s taking about every 30 minutes at a time.”

“There are moments in Elstree where I’ll be getting a spray tan and I’ll think: ‘Wow, this is my life. What’s going on?’” he says. “I’ve lapped the whole thing up. I wore guyliner on Saturday because Katya had her make-up done, and mine was only a sort of smooth over the face, so I said: ‘What do you think about a little bit of that liner on my eyes?’”

During the show’s run, he has got particularly close to his North East sister Vicky Pattison (“We really seemed to get each other”), who was voted off last week, but the old cliché rings true: the contestants are all one big family in their “weird bubble” (and, yes, they do have a WhatsApp group, and, no, he’s not for telling me what gets said on there, other than “a bit of schedule admin”).

They don’t hang out over a post-show debrief over a large vino because, at that point, they’re all on their knees, having been at the studios for a solid 15 hours.

“Everyone is so busy. We all train in different studios, so Monday to Thursday, we’re not with each other. Then, on a Friday and Saturday, everyone’s just passing ships until you get to the dress run – there’s that much going on, it’s jam-packed, so you don’t get much time to hang out,” he says. “It’s relentless. It does take it out of you, but, at the same time, the rewards override that for me. Katya’s energy gets me through – she is an absolute machine. Physically and mentally, she is so strong. I haven’t seen a dip in her at any point in the full eight weeks.”

As of this weekend’s show, all 13 of Cope’s siblings will have had a seat in the audience to watch their brother dance. “They love it, absolutely love it. It’s weird because it’s not their world at all, but everyone loves them because they’re just normal, down-to-earth, nice people.”

His memories of childhood back this up. “It was great, because it meant I always had somebody to play with. I didn’t need friends outside, I had so many within the family,” he smiles. “We’d always be out in the street playing football or on the BMX, then we’d have to have 20 minutes each on the Xbox. The one thing that stuck with me the most is being 14 of us, it was never about me. I hold on to that all the time.”

Cope’s “brilliant” mother – who had to cook all the family meals in large woks because normal pans couldn’t cope with the volume of food needed – used to ferry her brood around (they had an eight-seater; Nan would follow in her eight-seater) to boxing, football, horse riding – and the local performing arts class. “I didn’t really like it, but some of the others did, so Mum said I would have to go along and sit and wait for them. I ended up joining in for a bit, but then I quit because I was going to secondary school and it wasn’t cool. We’re talking 20 years ago, and I was just too afraid of what people would think.”

That could well have been the end of that – until the drama teacher running the class told him they were holding auditions for Billy Elliot. “They asked if I would go along and I said: ‘No, no, I’m not interested.’ But a few days later, I thought: ‘Why do I care so much about what other people think? Because actually, I quite fancy that.’ From doing that show, I’ve learnt to follow my own path, for myself.”

Cope escaped bullying – having eight brothers into boxing will do that, as he points out – but inevitably faced obstacles due to his background. “I mean, there are always going to be those challenges – even without being from a working-class background, it is challenging to be in this industry, and not being able to afford to go to drama school was hard.” But thanks to a hefty student loan, he did manage to spend three years at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, after which the TV acting roles came along.

Cope has clearly become an important influence on many boys and menfolk – something of a poster boy for possibility. “There are boys now who have started dancing because they watched me on the show, and grown men have been sending me messages, saying: ‘I never thought my Saturday nights would look like this.’”

Though you never can totally predict these things, Cope is surely a shoo-in for the Strictly final. “It’s not something I think about really. It’s out of my hands, so I just focus on things that are in my control.” There is one thing he has considered, though. “What would be great is if we could get all the siblings on the front row. Katya said she wants them to do a Mexican wave.”

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When it all ends, he will be straight up the A1 to Hartlepool to see his 88-year-old Nana Dot and the rest of the family, where they’ll be putting crackers out for, oh, just the 29 people come Christmas Day. “We put five tables up coming through from the kitchen and each sibling has something that they have to organise for the meal. The meat will be in the slow cooker and we all peel the veg for a good hour in the morning. You’d think it’d be all gone, but there’s food for days after.”

Veg peeling duties aside, there will be a long-overdue sit-down for Cope. “The thing I’m most proud of is learning a new skill as an adult. I’m not, like, old – I’m only 30 – but, even so, you tend to stick to the comfort of what you already know.

Learning a new dance every single week, sometimes you manage to pull off a decent performance on a Saturday night, but that’s not how it looks in the run-up – it’s not immediate, it is hard, hard work.”

The ‘Strictly Come Dancing Blackpool Special’ airs on Saturday at 6.35pm on BBC One

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