Choreographer Arlene Phillips may be about to be dropped as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing, replaced by a younger, less knowledgeable model, but she was in no mood to be vengeful or vindictive on Desert Island Discs yesterday.

“It’s the BBC’s programme,” she said, “and they can do what they like with it.” She explained that she was sometimes hard on the contestants because she was always hard on herself.

We learned a lot about Arlene on the BBC Radio 4 programme, not just that she was determined to succeed from the moment she got the dancing bug, and not least that she got her big break while baby-sitting for film director Ridley Scott, then making television commercials, who asked her to choreograph an ad for Lyon’s Maid ice-cream.

We always think of 1956 as the watershed year for modern British theatre, with Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court and the visit of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to the Palace Theatre in the year of his death.

But another world famous company, the Bolshoi, also paid their first, eye-opening  visit to Britain in 1956, and astounded the audiences in the Royal Opera House — and at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, where a teenaged Arlene fell in love with Galina Ulanova.

Ulanova was the prima ballerina assoluta for whom Prokofiev wrote his Romeo and Juliet and to whom both Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev deferred as simply the best.

She was forty-six when Arlene saw her dance the dying swan, and Tchaikovsky’s music was one of her eight discs alongside Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” Dinah Washington singing Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (the one she would keep over all others) and Ella Fitzgerald singing the Gershwins’ “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

When she came to London, Arlene took jazz dance classes from Molly Molloy, and formed the sexy Hot Gossip dance troupe (which included Sarah Brightman) as a stage act that Kenny Everett put on his early evening television show causing a puritanical uproar led by the censorious self-appointed watchdog Mary Whitehouse — and of course even more news headlines and stories.

I first saw Arlene with no clothes on when she danced the sensational nude pas de deux in Oh! Calcutta! in 1970 (I hasten to add I haven’t seen her with no clothes on since) alongside my friends Linda Marlowe and Noel Tovey, and she was soon in the thick of the pop video world working for Elton John, Boy George and Queen. Elton’s “I’m Still Standing” was record number six.

She said she owed most to Andrew Lloyd Webber, who had been a huge fan of Hot Gossip and many years later married Sarah Brightman; he brought her on board for Starlight Express in 1984 and opened up a whole new theatre career for her, and she chose Lon Satton and Ray Shell singing the title number.

She had good reasons for choosing two over-familiar favourites: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana because a TV newsreader dancing to it convinced her that Strictly Come Dancing would take off; and Pachelbel’s Canon because it’s her favourite warm-up soundtrack.

Her book would be Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women — which she said she’s already read 250 times — and her luxury a pair of tweezers to keep her eyebrows in order.

She mentioned her daughters by name (she had the first when she was 36, the second at the age of 47) but not her partners. I have a hunch that her long-standing partner Angus will be glad to see a little more of her after the hectic television studio and touring stage show schedule of Strictly Come Dancing.

And it’s high time she was back in the West End with something besides Grease. 
 

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