Strictly’s Arlene Phillips: ‘I don’t think the BBC cares about what it did to me’

Two weeks ago, after six decades in the world of theatre and dance, Dame Arlene Phillips accepted her first ever Olivier Award for best theatre choreographer for Guys & Dolls, to a standing ovation in the Royal Albert Hall. At the age of almost 81, she walked on stage wearing a fitted black Vampire’s Wife dress, diamonds gifted from her days as a Strictly Come Dancing judge (2004-2008), metallic nail polish and false eyelashes.

Today, Dame Arlene is still very much walking on cloud nine: “It was incredible, I mean, astounding, that I was being recognised for the [specific] work.” She shakes her head.

It’s as if she can’t quite believe it herself, despite the 60 years of shaping the choreography of all the seminal West End and Broadway hits.

Only this morning, her great friend and boss Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was an early fan of her very sexy 1970s dance troupe Hot Gossip, emailed her. They are currently working on a revamp of Starlight Express, which is returning to the UK later this year, some 36 years after she worked on the original. She is also rehearsing a new cast for the UK Grease tour, following its 2022 West End revival. What did Lloyd Webber have to say? Phillips is coy. “Well, I won’t tell you exactly, but he was saying how much I deserved it.”

It’s easy to see why people love her. She arrives at the café in Belsize Park in north London, near where she lives with her partner of almost 40 years, in a big coat, black trainers, black trousers and fuchsia sweater. She looks at least 20 years younger than her age (she turns 81 next month), likely because she doesn’t drink or smoke – “I tried them briefly when I was younger. I feel in good health but I’m not as fast or as strong as I used to be. I just carry on!”

Nobody bats an eye. She could just as easily be arriving in her other incarnation as devoted grandmother of Lila, five, and Emee, three, the children of her elder daughter Alana, now 44. Back in her Strictly days, particularly when she was unceremoniously dumped by the BBC in 2009 for the very much younger Alesha Dixon, Phillips was mobbed and trailed by tabloid paparazzi: “I literally couldn’t leave the house.”

It’s long past lunch so she chooses a “blue algae” latte, her usual, which arrives looking like a warm nuclear explosion in a glass. A healthy option? She shakes her head. “Don’t be fooled, it’s loaded with sugar.”

Her hair is a chestnut brown, wavy and fashionably bobbed. The tweakments she used to have – Botox, fillers – stopped during Covid. “I still have a sort of massaging face treatment,” she says, gesturing to her throat and neck, “but I hate pain and I hate needles.”

She walks a lot every day, and demonstrates moves to her dancers, but has a bad left knee “Too many knee slides! Too much floor work.” Her knee cracks as she shifts in her chair. “See!” she cries, “hear that?”

The way Phillips sits is striking. Her small body – “too stocky for ballet as much as I once wanted to be a classical dancer” – owns the space in a way usually seen in men. Her legs are positioned wide apart as she leans back in the chair. It’s strikingly and fabulously confident. It says a lot about how Phillips has consistently defied society’s expectation of a woman born in 1943 who is still 100 per cent “relevant”, to use the parlance of the young dancers she continues to train and inspire, choreographing in a world where TikTok reigns and inspires: “I’d love to be on TikTok more. It’s just time. The dancers I rehearse are young enough to be my grandchildren. Some are still in dance school!

“But I’ve always been an early on-taker of the zeitgeist. I have the unique honour of having had my name mentioned twice in the House of Commons, once in the Seventies when Mary Whitehouse said I was the immoral raunchy woman responsible for the Hot Gossip, supposedly corrupting the nation.”

Phillips continues. “And then years later after the BBC dropped me, Harriet Harman [minister for women and equality] asked the House questions about ageism in the BBC. We became great friends after that.” She beams.

In November 2021, she became the oldest person ever to go on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here (an achievement formerly held by Stanley Johnson). She was the first to be eliminated. Just a month later, the Queen made her a Dame for services to dance and charity. This high/low contrast seems to neatly sum up her range: high theatre versus reality TV; close friends with the very best of the British arts establishment (Lloyd Webber, Nicholas Hytner, Ridley Scott, who gave her first proper break with a TV commercial) and the very youngest up-and-coming dancers; Hot Gossip raising temperatures; mixed with the future wholesome quality of Strictly. 

She has spent the morning in the Loose Women studio discussing her friend and fellow Strictly judge, the late Len Goodman, on the first anniversary of his death. They worked on Strictly in pilot form before it launched in 2004. “We all had our roles. I was the strict teacher, demanding more and more of people. Bruno [Tonioli] was the clown.” Simon Cowell called her “the queen of mean”. “I had my severe look, make-up, hair, everything severe.”

But after four years, her run on the show came to an abrupt halt. In the summer of 2009, just a week or so after she had been on Desert Island Discs, Phillips discovered that she had been dropped from Strictly after a radio station rang her for a comment. “It was such a shock. I would have liked to have been treated like an adult.”

Alesha Dixon, a former Strictly winner and much younger, was her replacement. The optics were very bad. Harman’s question in Parliament about ageism in the BBC went unanswered by executives. “I’ve always thought that older women should be seen. It’s part of life. We still see so many older men [on television]. There are more older women now but it is still not 50/50.”

“I don’t think the BBC would think or care about what it did to me for a moment,” she says. “It was within its rights. I was on a year’s contract. But I had been there from the start and the three men on the panel all stayed. Why couldn’t the BBC have called me in and asked ‘Would you like to [make a statement]’? It’s about respecting people, no matter how confident they seem or how secure.”

Recently, news broke that her friend Robin Windsor, the 44-year-old ex Strictly professional, had been found dead in a hotel room. Phillips gasps at the tragedy. Shortly before his death, he had phoned to ask her if he could shadow her choreographing a musical, a familiar route for ex-Strictly dancers: “But I wasn’t rehearsing a show at the time,” she says. Windsor had suffered a back injury, forcing him to leave Strictly in 2013. He never returned. “Injury is devastating for a dancer or a sportsperson,” she says, “It’s life-changing because how do you find a way to turn your life around?” Some don’t. “Nobody knew about Robin’s [pain] and deep depression. I didn’t. We were [in contact] all the time. We were friends,” she says. “Sometimes the people who you think are the strongest are the most insecure.”

Phillips’s life has not been without its own pain. She grew up in Manchester in a home where there was little money. Her father – prone to shouting – was a barber, her mother, by contrast, was sweet and gentle, a stay-at-home wife who would sing Dinah Washington’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes to Phillips at bedtime.

Both parents loved ballet and would scrape money together for the cheapest seats in ballet productions. Phillips attended ballet classes, her younger sister too and, in time, her sister “donated” her classes to Phillips because she begged for more but there just weren’t the resources: “Life wasn’t easy,” she explains, “I think that is why I fell in love with dance. Being a beautiful ballerina was for me [access] to a beautiful life.”

When she was 15, her mother died of leukaemia aged 43. There had been just three months between finding out and her death. Phillips looks grief-stricken now, at the memory 65 years later: “I have always felt that there will always be a way through, that the [misery] won’t last. But I look back now and realise how young we all were. We were so lost because there was no help, no one coming to make sure we were OK. My dad got sick too so we all sort of got on with our lives. My sister and I went back to school, carried on. My older brother had to leave and get a job.”

The plan that Phillips might audition for a London dance school on a scholarship was abandoned, and instead, her aunt took her to the local council offices to demand a grant that would enable her to study dance there. She won a grant to the Muriel Tweedy ballet school in Manchester, but was not a natural ballet dancer: “It’s not really about size, it’s about how your limbs are formed but I worked and worked and got myself to the front of the class.” Her college sent her to London for a ballet course and, by chance, she saw a sign for modern American jazz, taught by the American choreographer Molly Molloy, now dead. “If there is one person who has shaped me, it’s her.”

She took the class and had an epiphany. She no longer needed to be a second-rate ballet star: “I couldn’t go back to Manchester, not even for my toothbrush, because I knew if I did, I’d never get back to London.”

In London, Phillips trained to be a dance teacher, teaching American jazz routines at the Pineapple Dance Studios in Covent Garden, then at the Italia Conti Stage School: “Molly was everything to me, she encouraged me. I really struggled when I was trying to get work as a dancer. I certainly had times when I lacked every single ounce of confidence.”

In the early days as a teacher, she held down many jobs to pay the bills, and to allow her to pursue her career as a choreographer, including working in a factory in Dagenham checking Second-World-War coats for bullet holes before they were sold in a market in Notting Hill. She’d turn up to classes stinking of mothballs. Nobody would dance near her.

She became a nanny for Ridley Scott (the now renowned Hollywood director) who asked her to choreograph a Lyons Maid commercial. A Dr Pepper commercial followed, this time at Pinewood. But it was the formation of Hot Gossip in 1974, from a collection of students in her dance classes, that was to change her life. She chose the troupe’s name, in the hope that they’d be talked about, but for three years, there wasn’t so much as a whisper. Then, after two years on the club scene, they were picked up by Michael Summerton, who became her manager/agent. By 1978, they were given a prime time TV slot on The Kenny Everett Video Show slithering around in outrageous outfits, as Phillips says, “girls with girls, boys with boys”.

Cue the Mary Whitehouse outrage and her first mention in Parliament: “I wonder what people would think of it now?” she says, “Too bold?” Possibly. Today’s generation can be notoriously squeamish about sex on television: “It was the early days of the future!” she says of a new climate of sexual expression: sex shops, PVC outfits, nightclubs and, tragically, Aids which was to start claiming her friends in the 1980s.

By the late 1970s, with Phillips in her 30s, her career had taken off. She was flown to the US to work on the musical film Can’t Stop the Music, a fictionalised biography of the disco group Village People.  She became pregnant on set aged 36 with her daughter Alana. She was a single mother from the outset: “I don’t talk about [the father]”, but didn’t let it hinder her career. In 1982, she was choreographing the film Annie, teaching Albert Finney how to tap dance, taking her toddler wherever she went.

Throughout the 1980s, there were music videos: Elton John, Tina Turner, Whitney Houston. In 1985, on the set of Freddie Mercury’s I Was Born to Love You, filmed in a derelict Canary Wharf, she met her long-term partner Angus Ion, a set builder, with whom she would have a daughter, Abi – now 33 and her assistant – when she was 47: “I thought I was in the menopause for the first three months!” She adores her girls with whom she is “so very close”.  By the late 1980s, she had musicals on both sides of the Atlantic.

But it was Summerton who was pivotal in her career: “He took on me and Hot Gossip. And then said, ‘Darling, there’s this new show [Strictly] the BBC are thinking of… It seems like all you have to do is talk about dancing. Darling, do give it a try.’”

So she was understandably devastated when, the day before the news of her Strictly exit broke, Summerton died of cancer of the spine. She was at his bedside at the Maudsley Hospital: “I barely had a chance to grieve, to sort myself out.”

Phillips is now at a stage of her life where her friends are dying; Len Goodman was 78 when he died last year: “I had always thought age didn’t apply to me, and then I turned 80. My friends are passing away, many of them younger than me, and so I have started to ask ‘how many years do I have left?’ I used to feel like I could go on forever.” She sighs. She doesn’t plan, but she wants to slow down, “start saying “no” a bit more. I don’t like to think of the next 10 years. My father got dementia. I just carry on. I do want to spend as much time as I can with my granddaughters.”

Phillips has triumphed over so much with a work ethic that would render a packhorse lame: poverty, professional rejection, single motherhood. She told Desert Island Discs: “I can give [dancers] something to make them the dancers they want to be because I have made that journey and I know how they can make it.”

Does she see resilience today? “Some [dancers] are what I call old school,” she says, “Because within them is this desire to work, to achieve, and there are others who stand on their own two feet. I think parents have become more protective. It doesn’t mean these dancers won’t succeed, I think they just have their own way of doing it.”

She is a different kind of teacher now “because of the fear of upsetting everybody or anybody, either with a group or a one on one”.

“You want to, you have to, search that everybody is OK and understand that everybody is individually made. They are not a fortified group the way we all had to be [when I trained]. There was no let-up in group activities then. We were all sent outside in all weathers with a skipping rope.”

There is a pay-off: “[qualities] of sturdiness, inner strength, I think they are lost sometimes.” 

Every production she works on now involves diversity training: “Workshops, meetings, pages and pages about how to approach people.” She is not phased “because I feel it’s always been the case for me. Hot Gossip was so diverse. The gay community was my world in the 70s and 80s.”

If Phillips worries about anything in showbusiness, it is the long-term effect of shows like Strictly, I’m a Celebrity… and Big Brother on the contestants, easy fodder for the tabloids as she herself was: “We don’t take enough care in what rejection really means. There is this sense that you are in the Strictly ‘family’ or the Big Brother/I’m a Celebrity… ‘family’. But then it starts to unravel. Some people are in the [safe] ‘family’ and loving it, and others aren’t, and so people can feel unsettled and suddenly filled with unhappiness.” (Actress Amanda Abbington dropped out of Strictly last year clearly outside “the family”, posting on Instagram a photo of the late Robin Williams with the caption “people don’t fake depression… they fake being okay”. )

“It’s vital that these shows look at what happens inside [a person] and take care of them afterwards” says Phillips.

She looks at her watch. Her phone has been pinging with texts from her daughter, Abi. Her Instagram feed is hotting up following her Olivier win, most recently with the addition of Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) video, which she made with the star in New York in 1987: “Whitney was so sweet and shy!” She’s about to jump on a Zoom call. Tonight, she’s going to the first night of Two Strangers (Carry a Cake across New York), a musical transferring to the West End.

“Be brave! Be adventurous! Do what you like!” she says as she heads out of the door. She’s good at taking her own advice, except when it means slowing down.

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