Angela Rippon THE OLDIE OF THE YEAR
A s the late great Sir Bruce Forsyth would have said, ‘Didn't she do well?’
She did better than well – she did brilliantly. In November 2023, Angela May Rippon, born in Plymouth on 12th October 1944, waltzed, tangoed, rumba'd and cha-cha-cha'd her way to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom as the oldest-ever contestant in the 20-year history of the BBC's most popular talent competition, Strictly Come Dancing.
If you follow the show, you will know that, apart from winning, ‘getting to Blackpool’ is what it's all about. The Tower Ballroom, a late-Victorian Frank Matcham masterpiece, is the Mecca of ballroom dancing. All the ballroom greats have strutted their stuff on its fabulous sprung floor. Every year, the Strictly contenders simply want to survive the early rounds to get themselves to Blackpool.
Angela Rippon did just that – in her 80th year and in some style. With her professional dance partner and coach, choreographer Kai Widdrington, 28, beneath the famous Blackpool chandelier, with apparently effortless grace, she danced her last dance: an American Smooth performed to the Ella Fitzgerald version of Tea for Two.
It was a fitting finale to a fabulous two months of Saturday-night telly in which the veteran newsreader wowed us with her high style and high kicks. She's 79 and still doing the splits.
And, all through her run on Strictly, she kept going with her day job, too: researching, rehearsing and presenting Rip Off Britain, the BBC2 consumer affairs programme she co-hosts with two other golden oldies, Gloria Hunniford, 83, and Julia Somerville, 76.
‘I'll stop working when the phone stops ringing,’ she says. ‘The splits – that's nothing. It's a party trick. It's not dancing. It's just that I'm flexible and strong.’
Angela knew she was never going to win Strictly. She was up against bobbydazzling Bobby Brazier, aged 20, who beat her in the dance-off, as well as the two most likely eventual winners of the series: actress Ellie Leach, 22, and 29-year-old actor and dancer Layton Williams.
Without question,
