Strictly Come Dancing's Ellie Taylor: 'Other girls would laugh because I was so gangly'

Until recently if you googled the comedian Ellie Taylor and Strictly Come Dancing the result was a three-year-old clip of Taylor, dressed as a newsreader, on BBC Two’s satirical news show The Mash Report announcing, “As TV’s favourite dancing show continues to be dogged by infidelity, experts studying the so-called 'Strictly curse' have been unable to fathom how two people spending days rubbing their genitals together to romantic music could possibly end up shagging.”

It was – and is – very funny, but now Taylor, 38, is a contestant on the nation’s biggest entertainment show. Have her fellow dancers – including actor Will Mellor, footballer Tony Adams and Paralympian Ellie Simmonds – seen the clip? “Oh, I don’t know,” Taylor cringes. “Obviously I was playing a character and that was written by someone else.”

It's pretty safe to say Taylor and her husband of eight years, the Australian news presenter Phil Black, will escape said curse since her dance partner, South African Johannes Radebe, is gay, last year making it to the final in his spectacular all-male pairing with John Whaite.

But watching them rehearse in a glamorous dance studio in an otherwise downtrodden cul-de-sac in West London it’s immediately obvious why – visually at least - they’re a good pair. Radebe is 6ft and Taylor, a former model, is 5ft11in.

Temperamentally, they also seem brilliantly matched, laughing as they practice tonight’s opening dance – a quickstep. But when she stops for a break, Taylor, who has no dance training, is highly dubious about her chances.

“This is all new and strange. When I was a teenager at school trying to do Spice Girl routines, the other girls would laugh because I was so tall and gangly. So I shut down any idea of wanting to dance. Then I was a rubbish model because I didn’t know how to hold my body. I've never had to use it with poise and elegance. So I’ve had to come to terms with the fact I really don't have much coordination and swallow it down because it's really quite embarrassing.”

I suspect she may be over-egging it, but then self-deprecation is one of Taylor’s stock tools. In recent years, she’s been all over television and radio, doing everything from regular appearances on shows such as Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, hosting her Radio 4 show Ellie Taylor’s Safe Space, presenting The Great Pottery Throwdown and playing Sassy in the multiple-Emmy-winning Apple TV+ comedy Ted Lasso.

“At first I didn’t tell anyone I was in Ted Lasso because I didn’t think I’d done a very good job,” she laughs. “Then people started telling me it was good. I got Apple TV quite reluctantly – another bloody subscription service and then I was like, ‘It’s lovely!’ I haven’t been to the US since Covid but I saw people were dressing up as Sassy at Hallowe’en – it’s wild.”

Cancel culture has upended many of her peers – recently the controversial Jerry Sadowitz saw his show’s run cancelled at the Edinburgh festival, a moment fellow comedian Jack Dee described as sending “a shiver down my spine.” Yet it’s entirely passed Taylor by.

“[Cancellation’s] just not something I would worry about because I can't imagine what I could be cancelled for,” Taylor shrugs. “Inevitably some politics will creep into comedy, but generally I’m not looking at the big, spiky issues. My stuff is mostly very self-obsessed, very domestic, silly, whimsical, playful – it’s not exactly [The Mash Report’s] Nish Kumar. It’s about slagging off my sister for moving to Australia.”

Some of her earlier work, she admits, wouldn’t stand up in the current climate. Take Snog, Marry, Avoid, the BBC Three “makeunder” show where “fakery obsessed” women were divested of – or to in today’s language “shamed” about their layers of make-up and skimpy clothes and “exposed” as natural beauties. “We wouldn’t make that anymore, its feminist values are slightly out of touch with today's mindset,” she grins. “It was of its time as people say. It’s interesting that in just the 12 years I’ve been doing my job you say, ‘That wouldn’t happen now.’ We move on. That’s a good thing.”

If Taylor’s courted controversy it was with her bestselling memoir published last year, My Child and Other Mistakes, in which she admitted to the female heresy of having never particularly wanted a baby and – immediately after her daughter was born in 2019 – not enjoying motherhood at all. “The house felt really dark and lifeless and it was a while before the sun came out again. I loved my daughter but I thought, ‘We’ve made a terrible mistake,’” she told me last year.

Her confessions may have upset some in the why-have-children-only-to-complain-about-them bracket. Yet the majority of responses were heartfelt and positive. “The only repercussions are I still get weekly messages from people who say it’s been recommended by their doctor. So much of what I do disappears into the ether whereas the book feels like something that's real and will hang around. I’m so proud of it. And once you read any of it, you realise it's written with such love for both mothers and children and for myself as a new mother and for my daughter”

Taylor was pregnant when another sketch for The Mash Report made her a feminist heroine. In it her newsreader character announced, ‘Women everywhere have told everyone to ‘“Just f*** off.”’ She continued: ‘Tired of being judged for choosing to have children, or not have children. To have children and go back to work, to have children and not go back to work. For being too thin, too fat, too pushy, too unambitious, too hot, not hot enough. Or even for just daring to be alive…”

To date the clip has had more than 128 million views worldwide and been reposted on Instagram by Jennifer Aniston and on Twitter by Madonna.  “The baby was a few weeks old, I was in bed with mastitis feeling really, really unwell and thinking, ‘Everything is awful. I've ruined it all.’ And then Madonna was retweeting me, it was like, ‘Is this a cheese dream? I don't know what's going on.’ Every International Women’s Day it does the rounds again –  it’s lovely.”

Taylor, who has an English degree from York University, grew up in Brentwood, Essex, where she still lives. The family (her father was a company secretary, her mother stayed at home) were big Victoria Wood and French and Saunders fans.  “My household was always very silly. That's a trait I try hard to keep hold of, because it's something you lose in grown-up life.”

As a child, she was a show-off, yearning for approbation  – which she now obtains through audiences’ laughter. “At school I always wanted good marks, to get a little pat on the head and I moved that into a career.” Was there no naughty phase? “No, I was always boringly strait-laced.”

In Strictly, she’s now hoping for the equivalent of a gold star from head judge Shirley Ballas. “That would be amazing. If I was like the geek at school, Shirley’s the head teacher.”

The 15 contestants already have a thriving WhatsApp group. “It’s packed with encouraging voice notes and funny pictures of people coming home absolutely done in.” Judging by the opening group dance, Taylor tips singer-songwriter Fleur East, CBBC star and singer Molly Rainford, actor Kym Marsh and radio DJ Tyler West  (“He’s got a good few little moves”) as potential ones to watch. As for Taylor: “I've just got to keep in my own lane,” she says. “I've got no experience. I don't know what I'm doing. But I'll give it a bloody good shot.”

Strictly Come Dancing continues tonight on BBC One at 6.45pm