Strictly Come Dancing star Amy Dowden won the nation’s hearts with her courageous return to the ballroom last year, after a life-threatening battle with stage-three breast cancer and a terrifying brush with sepsis during treatment.
Despite becoming a viewers’ favourite on the hit BBC show, the Welsh dancer has opened up about the deep sadness she feels over ‘letting down’ fellow cancer sufferers after she and her celebrity partner, Apprentice star Thomas Skinner, were the first to be voted off this series.
‘I’m gutted to be out of the competition because I really wanted to represent cancer survivors – and I feel like I’ve let them down,’ she tells me at the Women of the Year Awards at the Royal Lancaster hotel in London.
‘I wanted Thomas to go far but, selfishly, I wanted to do it for the cancer community. Since my diagnosis, I came back, got pulled out, came back again and then finished last.’
Amy, 35, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023, less than a year after she and fellow dancer Benjamin Jones were married.
She underwent a mastectomy, followed by IVF treatment just two weeks later in a bid to preserve her chances of having children in the future.
Amy was given the all-clear from breast cancer early last year, but her initial return to Strictly — when she was partnered with JLS singer JB Gill — was cut short after just six weeks due to a foot injury.
‘I just wanted to show what you can be capable of following life after cancer,’ she says.
Amy Dowden at the Women of the Year awards on Monday
‘But I keep telling myself, coming back onto Strictly and getting back on the dancefloor will show ladies and men there is life after a cancer diagnosis.’
He went on to become the country’s favourite television globetrotter, but Sir Michael Palin recalls originally struggling to win the approval of travel presenting legend Alan Whicker.
The Monty Python star, who made his big debut on 1989’s Around The World in 80 Days with Michael Palin, remembers: ‘He [Whicker] was quite rude about my travels around the world to start with. He said, “He’s not a proper traveller, he’s an actor”.’
Palin happily adds however: ‘But then he mellowed. By a quirk of fate, I was voted best travel programme one year and who did they get to present the award? Alan Whicker.
‘And after that we corresponded quite a lot.’
Paradise? No, Bali’s rubbish!
She’s inspired others with her victory on Strictly Come Dancing and her pioneering acting career, but Rose Ayling-Ellis was left disheartened by her trip to the ‘paradise island’ of Bali earlier this year.
‘It’s overrated,’ says the actress, who was the first deaf contestant to appear on Strictly.
‘I went to Bali with this ideal and it was not what I expected at all. There was plastic and rubbish everywhere.’
Strictly Come Dancing champion Rose Ayling-Ellis was the first deaf contestant to appear on the show
She adds on the Travel Secrets podcast: ‘I just couldn’t connect to the spiritual travellers out there.’
The Duchess of Rutland runs a tight ship at Belvoir Castle.
The 62-year-old chief executive of the family’s Leicestershire estate, where scenes in The Crown were filmed, hires interns each season, and says: ‘Belvoir has become somewhat of a finishing school. I am tough, though – working here is no easy option.’ She adds: ‘In return, we feed them, house them, pay them £150 a week – and I remind every [intern] that you are back at the bottom of the food chain. When the boss says, “Jump”, you ask, “How high?”’
Dame Joan on a not so Iron Lady
Dame Joan Collins paid tribute to Margaret Thatcher at a dinner to mark 100 years since the birth of the late prime minister, where guests included former Tory leaders Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith.
The Dynasty star, 92, says: ‘I remember going to her 80th birthday and, she was sitting there, and she looked up and down my young husband,’ reveals Joanie, 92. She adds: ‘[It was] To check him out.’
Percy Gibson, her fifth and current husband, turned 60 yesterday. Soon after she married the Peru-born producer in 2002, Dame Joan remarked: ‘At first people would say, “What are you going to do about the age difference?” I’d say, “Well, if he dies he dies!”’
Alexandra Tolstoy’s epic hospital dash
Adventurer Alexandra Tolstoy has embarked on a new chapter, leading horse trips for intrepid travellers.
She’s pictured on her latest odyssey which took her to ‘two of the most beautiful and untouched areas of Kyrgyzstan’. But it ended in an eight-hour taxi dash to the capital, Bishkek, ‘before an ambulance to hospital’, after Alexandra, who’s asthmatic, suffered bronchitis in sub-zero temperatures. An X-ray and two steroid drips – ‘to stop my lungs spasming before the 18-hour journey to London yesterday’ – followed.
Adventurer Alexandra Tolstoy suffered bronchitis in sub-zero temperatures on a trip to Kyrgyzstan
‘Frightening,’ Alexandra, who is on the mend, concedes.
Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice is taking no chances with his mobile phone in Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s crime-hit London. ‘I have this strap on my phone, it’s attached to a rope that goes around my wrist,’ Tice tells me at the Margaret Thatcher Centre’s Centennial dinner at The Guildhall in the City.
The MP, 61, has yet to be targeted by thieves but says: ‘It’s happened to loads of friends of mine.’
Reform leader Nigel Farage once snapped, ‘I dare you to walk through the West End of London after 9 o’clock of an evening wearing jewellery,’ when a journalist suggested he was scaremongering over Britain’s theft epidemic. Farage added: ‘You wouldn’t do it.’
