‘It’s a 10 for Len’: farewell to gloriously gobby Goodman, the Strictly ballroom sensation

In 2004, as his 60th birthday approached, Len Goodman was preparing to retire from his professional enthusiasm – a ballroom dancing school in Dartford, Kent – to spend more time with private passions: his family, golf.

His one regret was that the BBC was working on a new hoofing show, having axed Come Dancing a decade earlier. Friends and colleagues were being auditioned, but Goodman had not been asked. He admitted in his memoirs to being miffed enough about this omission that he lied to friends about having turned down an offer.

Eventually, just before the recording of a pilot show, Goodman was contacted. Light entertainment bosses had panicked that the planned judging panel was imbalanced towards stage choreographers (Arlene Phillips, Craig Revel Horwood) and a Latinist (Bruno Tonioli), with no ballroom expert. Goodman’s audition consisted of teaching the producer, Izzie Pick Ibarra, salsa from scratch and commenting on film of dancing couples. He so impressed that he was appointed lead judge on what became Strictly Come Dancing.

There was one further hiccup: the BBC car picking him up for the tryout show couldn’t find the Kent golf club rendezvous, so they reached the studio after recording had started. The screen test went so well that Goodman – whose death was announced this morning, one day before what would have been his 79th birthday – lived out an extraordinary second act of celebrity, wealth, Emmy and National TV award nominations.

He served on Strictly Come Dancing from 2004-16, and, from 2005, was also on the panel of the US spin-off, Dancing with the Stars, on which he continued until last year, though with increasing gaps as travel and illness took a toll. When working on both the British and US versions, Goodman and Tonioli became the first British TV stars since Sir David Frost to appear in both country’s schedules each week. After the live Saturday (and recorded-for-Sunday vote reveal) of Strictly, they would fly to Los Angeles for the Monday night ABC studio session, returning later in the week for the next BBC show.

‘Everyone can dance’: a look back at Len Goodman’s life and career – video

This vertiginous reversal of fortune in later life was reflected in the typically plain-speaking title of Goodman’s 2008 autobiography, Better Late Than Never – From Barrow Boy to Ballroom. The reference to an East End market cart on which the young Len assisted his grandparents is more alliterative than accurate: the family also set up a shop, and eventually had three. Len, though, was certainly working-class, leaving school at 15 to become an apprentice welder in the London shipyards. He candidly admitted to having started dance classes because they were famed among schoolboys as a way of literally getting close to girls, but showed such finesse that he eventually turned professional, winning the British Ballroom championships in his 20s.

“I’m just a boy from Dartford who got lucky,” was the self-deprecating conclusion of his memoirs. Clearly, there was also talent and business acumen – his dance school was a success – but fortune also shaped his life. He subsequently discovered that another candidate had been slightly ahead of him for the fourth chair on Strictly, but was unavailable for the pilot due to a long-planned romantic holiday.

Goodman recalled that, at his audition, he suggested he should be picked over rivals (he knew who they were) who “all talk in very technical and boring ways about dancing. Their personalities don’t come through when they speak. All they will do is baffle people with specialist information.”

That was key to his appeal. Along with a small number of others who became TV celebrities at an age when many people are keener to sit in front of the screen at home – dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse, cook Mary Berry, furniture restorer Jay Blades, election analyst Sir John Curtice – Goodman spectacularly disproved the view once expressed by Michael Gove that “people have had enough of experts.” These TV careers prove that viewers hungrily consume expertise if it is delivered with clarity and lack of arrogance.

At that audition, the producer noted that Goodman always put a positive point first, regardless of how harsh he might be later. That was his view of what a good teacher should do and – even under provocation from such unnatural movers as broadcaster John Sergeant and politician Ann Widdecombe – the chief judge kept his promise to be more improving than reproving.

Even on 15 May 2004, when Strictly Come Dancing launched, the BBC’s demographic managers must have been surprised to have a show fronted by 76-year-old Bruce Forsyth and 60-year-old Goodman, both working-class Londoners who left school as soon as they could. But the super-franchise that survives them is a reminder that TV talent is sometimes found in unlikely places.