Anton Du Beke on life’s longer road, family ties and learning from the hard times
White Wine Question Time
Stak
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 March 2025
⏱️ 69 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, we’re joined by a Saturday night TV stalwart whose esteemed dance career has propelled him to stages and screens around the world, all without losing the cheeky glint he might as well have patented by now. It’s the charming Anton Du Beke!
Anton joins us just as he begins a mammoth tour across the UK. He chats about how the mistakes of his early days ended up paving the way for an overnight success, forty years in the making. We also talk about Anton's constant drive for greater success, the scarcely believable first impression he made on his wife and turning fascination into friendship with the likes of Bruce Forsyth and Len Goodman. It’s a fascinating conversation with a national treasure who doesn’t take himself too seriously - but takes his work hugely seriously.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Coming up on this episode of White Wine Question Time. |
| 0:07.0 | I always got really upset about dancing badly. |
| 0:11.0 | And it still does, actually. |
| 0:13.0 | I just felt at that moment my life could get any worse. |
| 0:16.0 | I mean, the cheap hotels have got no money in the arse end of Paris. |
| 0:23.6 | While everybody else is still competing and doing marvelously, |
| 0:27.5 | I've been chucked out early thinking, can't get any worse than this? |
| 0:31.8 | And thinking to myself, I'm going to have to chuck this in because I'm wasting my life. |
| 0:34.4 | You're terribly good at this. |
| 0:35.5 | Oh, thanks. |
| 0:37.2 | You are marvellous. And I look at him and I think, yes, this is a perfect role model of this is how to do it. I sound like an absolute nightmare. And that was the loveliest thing. |
| 0:56.8 | Hello and welcome to White Rang Question Time, the podcast that usually asks its guests, |
| 1:01.5 | three thought-provoking questions over three glasses of wine. But it's early, my guest doesn't drink, |
| 1:07.5 | and frankly, we're not savage. Not yet anyway. This is a man who is something of a, |
| 1:12.5 | well, showman, a true showman in the very best sense of the word, a man who spent decades waltzing, |
| 1:17.4 | quick-stepping, chach-cha-charing, his way into the nation's living rooms from the world of |
| 1:22.3 | competitive ballroom dancing. Whether he's on the dance floor, judging on the strictly panel, |
| 1:28.0 | or regaling audiences on stage as a song and dance man, he has become a Saturday night stall wall, which |
| 1:33.2 | has made all the sweeter by the fact that he really did struggle at times to get there. |
| 1:38.6 | Born in Sevenoaks in Kent, he discovered a passion for ballroom dancing at the age of 14, |
| 1:43.2 | by 16 had left school and started working a series of random jobs, initially in a factory and at one point as a bed salesman, or to help fund his dancing, giving him a very welcome escape from a difficult home life where his father's alcoholism and abusive behaviour loomed large. |
| 2:00.2 | It set him on a path to become one of the UK's |
... |
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