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For quite a while, Chris McCausland kept turning down the offer to appear on Strictly Come Dancing. He wasn’t going to do it this year either. “It terrified me,” he says. “I don’t mind stretching myself, but I have to know something’s possible.” And Strictly seemed impossible. Blind since his early 20s, McCausland spent his teenage years listening to 90s grunge and throwing himself around mosh pits rather than paying any attention to ballroom dancing. So he had no idea what an American smooth or a paso doble even looked like. For some, Strictly has been unavoidable for the last 20 years, but McCausland, 47, a comedian whose natural TV home is shows such as Would I Lie to You?, says the first time he ever heard the theme tune was when he was standing in the studio on launch night.
Why did he decide to embrace the sequins now? “As well as being a comedian, I am – whether I like it or not – representative of another group of people, people who are blind, people with a disability and people who are underrepresented.” He was so nervous before the first show that he couldn’t even eat. But it felt like an opportunity and a privilege, he says. “When you weigh that up, and you stop thinking about yourself so much, and the fact that you’re shitting your pants, there becomes more benefit than risk.”
He is proud to be the show’s first blind contestant. “I thought, if I do say no again, and they find somebody else who is blind, then I’ll never do it.” But he felt as if a lot was at stake. “I don’t mind being the butt of a joke, and if something goes wrong, I don’t mind laughing about it, but there’s a lot of weight in being the first blind guy on the show and it not being a disaster.” The idea, he says, “is to prove that this is doable. You need to do above the average significantly in order to represent in a good way and I just didn’t think that would be possible.”
How wrong he was – McCausland has been brilliant. From the beginning, his footwork has been superior and at the Blackpool show just over a week ago, he scored two 10s for his American smooth. He completely commits to each performance and while he may not be the best dancer of the remaining quarter-finalists, betting companies have him as the favourite to win. “It’s surprised me as much as anybody,” he says with a laugh. But it has been gruelling. When we meet in the on-site cafe at Strictly’s Elstree studios, he says he “can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel tired.”
It has been a difficult year for the show, with allegations of abuse in rehearsals emerging over the summer. “I don’t want to undermine anybody’s experience of it, because it is stressful,” says McCausland. “I think it’s worked well for the vast majority of people that have done it but a handful of people have had an issue and I’m sure it’s been hard for them.” He says the producers have gone “out of their way” to make things better than they have in the past – this includes a member of the production team now sitting in on rehearsals.
Having no visual frame of reference for the dances, McCausland’s professional dancer partner Dianne Buswell has had to teach him using detailed descriptions, metaphors and physically putting his body into the correct shapes. “Sometimes she has to just yank my arms where she wants them.” When the pair did the paso doble this weekend, the dramatic Latin dance, it took Buswell two days just to describe it. “I was like: ‘Are you sure this is right? It doesn’t feel like anyone should be standing like this.’” It has been helpful, says McCausland, to come up with mental images to perfect his posture. “I’ve found the best thing to do is pretend you need to go the toilet and keep your cheeks clenched.”
Aside from Buswell’s teaching methods, there haven’t been too many adjustments to the show. Beforehand, the producers asked McCausland if he’d prefer the studio audience to be quiet so he could hear where Buswell was in relation to him, but he said no. “I’m a comedian, part of the reason you’re in it is to create a good atmosphere.” He laughs and adds: “I’m a needy bastard.”
He has been thrilled with the support he has received from viewers. “My attitude was: I’ve never seen the show, but take it seriously and put 100% into it.” The remaining couples, he says, are “better than us, so all we can do is connect with people – that’s been our goal, me and Dianne, to connect with people, entertain and do the best that we can.” He has pitched it perfectly, throwing himself into it while also bringing a mischievous edge to the live broadcast. After his first dance, a cha-cha-cha, he spoke about the brilliant ludicrousness of the entire show. The dance, he deadpanned, was “nonsense. It’s like someone’s sucked all the fun out of dancing and replaced it with terms and conditions.”
Humour has been a constant in McCausland’s life. It was the way the family dealt with the eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, that affected his mother and grandmother, as well as McCausland and his sister (his 11-year-old daughter has not inherited the gene). As a child, he remembers being tested to see whether he had it – at that point he still had sight, but the condition would mean it would gradually deteriorate. “It just was always a thing,” he says. By the second year of primary school, he noticed that while he could see the blackboard in class, he couldn’t make out much of what was on it. Did it feel as if sight loss was hanging over him? “Not really. It is so slow that it’s like a frog in boiling water – you don’t notice it.” It brought many frustrations, and still does, but he says it was “never a sad thing”.
He grew up in a Liverpool suburb – though today, his accent is softened by nearly three decades in the south. His maths A-level teacher urged him to apply to university, and he ended up studying software engineering at Kingston, where he already had a friend. “I was terrified of this big new environment when you can’t see properly so he was kind of like a security blanket.” By then, his sight loss was almost total. “There’s a lot of denial and resistance to it, especially when you’re in your late teens and your early 20s. You’re always thinking you can do the things you could do yesterday and you’re always pretending you can see when you can’t.” He refused to use an aid such as a white cane. “When you’re 20, 21, you’re embarrassed, you think everybody is staring at you. There’s a lot of shame.”
Comedy helped. “I wouldn’t have known this at the time, but I think it was another form of denial. I never talked about being blind on stage and I think that was maybe me trying to be ‘normal’.” It was partly about challenging preconceptions – he didn’t want to only tell jokes about being blind – but also about him not feeling very comfortable with who he was. “I always thought, if I was in the audience and someone like me came on stage I’d think: ‘Oh fucking hell, this is going to be 20 minutes of blind jokes.’ Which is why I never talked about it – I always tried to make them forget and probably make myself forget.”
After university, working as a computer programmer became difficult due to his deteriorating sight. He was unemployed for a while, then he got a job in a call centre. Around that time, he challenged himself to write a five-minute comedy set. “It was never to do with a career. I just wanted to give it a go as a bit of a dare,” he says. “I had no performance skills whatsoever, I never did drama at school. My first gig was shit, I was so monotone. But I got enough laughs and I did it again. Then you loosen up, it becomes a hobby, you meet people and there’s a community. It was adrenaline and something to look forward to.”
After being a gigging comedian for years, McCausland was invited to be on the televised standup show Live at the Apollo in 2018. It couldn’t have gone better, he says, but it didn’t prove to be the springboard to TV panel shows and higher profile gigs that he’d hoped. He was trying to get on shows such as Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, but failing. Why weren’t they booking him? “It’s a risk with any comedian,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you can do standup, can you improvise? Can you be funny about topical stuff?” With McCausland, there were added considerations – and he thinks TV producers would have been concerned about making changes to the show. But they could have been small adjustments – changing a picture round to an audio round, for instance. These days, he says, shows are far more open to making them.
He also turned down offers to be on shows which only featured other disabled people. “It happens a lot every four years, or it used to, every time the Paralympics comes around. They’ll be like: ‘We’ve had this idea to put all these disabled people together in this comedy show. We’ve had the idea to send all these disabled people away together.’ I’ve always thought that’s segregation and not integration.” He could have been on TV much earlier had he done these kinds of shows, he says, but any fame from them “I think would have been very short-lived”. He thinks progress is being made. “It’s not: ‘We’re going to do Strictly for disabled people.’” And, while him being on the show may help improve the representation of blind and partially sighted people on TV, “I think the more important thing is everybody else seeing somebody blind on Strictly. It’s good that people can see somebody like themselves, but our problem is not ourselves; our problem is everybody else’s low expectations of us.”
McCausland has had a few acting roles, including in the children’s show Me Too! and Jimmy McGovern’s drama Moving On. As for the tricky subject of whether actors should only be cast in disabled roles if they themselves are disabled, he says: “I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as that. The problem isn’t ‘can non-disabled people play disabled people?’, the problem is there should be more disabled casting.” Even now, he says, usually “somebody only uses a wheelchair if that is the story. We need to get to the point where somebody has a script and they go: ‘Well, why can’t they use a wheelchair? It doesn’t mention it in the script but why can’t this person be deaf?’” That said, he adds with a laugh, he has written and is starring in a Christmas film for Sky, Bad Tidings, with the comedian Lee Mack, in which “the whole point of the film is a blind guy catching burglars. I’ve written that because I thought it would be funny, but I’ve created that job for myself.”
He’s busy now – he’s about to go on a huge tour: “And it goes on until I’m dead.” To crown this year, I’m hoping McCausland triumphs on Strictly.
It has really only been in the last 10 years or so that, he says, “I’ve maybe been comfortable in my own skin and happy to be me”. It was partly getting older, and having more life experience, but it also had a lot to do with the birth of his daughter. “I think that really changes your outlook on life and yourself,” he says. He had been fairly pragmatic about the impact of sight loss on his life, and ready to pivot careers when necessary, “whereas being a dad, you can’t just decide to find something else to do. I worried about it a lot, and there’s a lot of slack that my wife picks up, a lot of the logistical stuff.” But he loves his work, especially since he has found his own voice – an authenticity that has gone a long way to endear him to Strictly fans. “You stop trying to have a persona or put yourself across in a certain way, or even mimic other people. I did have a moment where I just kind of settled into being me – and that worked.”
