My first ever dance was the waltz.. on my dad's feet

Angela Rippon on tonight's Strictly routine

-  EMILY RETTER

Angela Rippon is laughing like a drain, laughing so hard, in fact, that she starts to cough. "Bosh, says her Strictly dance partner Kai Widdrington, and off they go again with the giggles.

Kai is describing the TikTok videos he has recently shown her in which "Bosh" has become a sign-off, a new catchphrase for the kids. Now they are both saying it after a "good run", he explains.

Angela can only titter helplessly. This was yesterday morning after a week of exhausting, six-hour training days.

And this is the relentlessly buoyant 79-year-old Angela we have come to know and love on the ballroom floor the woman who shoots up the stairs to Claudia every week like Roadrunner.

For a moment, she becomes reflective. Tonight she and Kai, 28, will ease off the accelerator and dance the waltz to Nat King Cole's Fascination, and she is thinking of her dad, John Rippon, the man she calls "the hero of my life".

She says: "My father loved dancing and if we went to a family occasion or anywhere there was dancing, I would stand on his feet while he danced around. I think waltzing was one of the first I ever did as a little girl.

"My father loved dancing and my mother was not so keen, so when I was growing up, even when I was a teenager, we danced. I remember once we entered a twist competition together." Perhaps it is especially poignant she is thinking of him the week before Remembrance Sunday, as her dad, who died a decade ago, was a Royal Marine during the Second World War, and only returned in 1948 when Angela was three-and-a-half.