Strictly star savagely reveals BBC series changed her life ‘not in a good way’

Former Strictly Come Dancing star Gabby Logan has revealed the BBC One competition changed her life ‘but not in a good way’.

The presenter and former gymnast starred on Strictly in 2007, partnered with James Jordan.

The same year, Gabby’s husband Kenny also competed on Strictly, partnered with James’ wife Ola.

Kenny and Ola were the ninth couple eliminated, while Gabby and James were the fourth.

The BBC Sport star, 51, has now spoken of the impact being voted out had on her mental health.

She recalled having an ‘amazing experience’ on the show, adding: ‘It was also kind of a life-changing experience in many ways, which sounds a bit dramatic, and you hear people go on Strictly saying, “It’s changed my life,” but this wasn’t in a good way.’

She went on: ‘It wasn’t that Strictly was bad for me per se, I absolutely adored it.’

However, she found it difficult to cope when she was voted out by the public.

In a conversation with Jessica Ennis-Hill for her Gold Minds podcast, Gabby continued: ‘And when you get voted out of Strictly, it’s so shocking because you go in every week, starting to work on your following week’s dance, and you don’t expect to go home, right?

‘And so I’d finished about just a quarter down the table, got some good scores for that week, and I was in the bottom two for the dance-off, which was quite a shock for everybody that I was there.’

She said she was ‘very much aware that people didn’t like me’, while viewers were such fans of Kenny, who made it to the quarterfinals.

‘It was a very sobering kind of experience, because in the days afterwards, not only was I missing, dreadfully missing the dancing, but also realizing that I felt like, what was it about me that people didn’t relate to or like?

‘And some of the things that were being written about me were that I was too competitive, and I think there’s been a real change in the way women are allowed to be competitive openly since then.

‘But at the time, even in 2007, I was seen as somebody who was too determined almost and wanted it too much and looked too disappointed when her scores were low.’

Gabby said her pro-partner Janes had been reminding her it was a TV show, but having come from a sporting background, she found it difficult to not do so well after putting in the hours of training.

‘I was very surprisingly devastated in the sense that it shook me kind of almost how upset I was about it,’ she went on.

The TV star went on to reveal that at one point, Kenny, who she married in 2001, rung Strictly bosses to ask if he could swap places with her and sacrifice himself to keep her in the show, but was of course told he couldn’t do so by producers.

‘It was a very confusing time,’ Gabby added, recalling how she would write in her journal that she couldn’t ‘make sense of things’, and kept questioning how she could ‘change’ for people who didn’t know her personally to like her.

Gabby has previously spoken about her experience being voted off early, and how she dealt with comments she received.

Writing for The Daily Mail in 2022, she said: ‘Perhaps I should have been a bit more hapless or humble, displaying more of a “Thanks for giving me this opportunity” kind of demeanour, more what the audience at the time probably expected from a woman.’

‘That period was one of the best of my professional life and simultaneously one of the most frustrating and sad,’ she went on.

‘I adored every second of my time on the show. It is a total honour to get to dance with these otherworldly beings.’

Gabby was eliminated in week four of Strictly, after scoring 30 points.

Over that time, she’d performed a quickstep, a jive and a samba, and was in the bottom two with Penny Lancaster and Ian Waite.

Alesha Dixon went on to win with Matthew Cutler, with EastEnders’ Matt Di Angelo finishing as runner-up.

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