According to Shirley Ballas, some professional dancers get frisky in their changing rooms before a performance.
The Strictly Come Dancing head judge, 63, tempted readers with stories of’sex, lying, and bed-hopping’ in her debut murder thriller Murder on the Dance Floor, hinting at just how X-rated things get backstage.
‘It’s a wondrous world of what goes on behind the scenes. It’s either things I’ve been part of, or things I’ve seen,’ she said. ‘You will have to guess when you read the book. But it’s pretty real to life, I would say.
‘Some of it takes part in Whitby in the closet, before we even get to Blackpool. Then they fix their knickers and go on and do their cha cha cha.’
She stated that some dancers do have sex behind the scenes before taking to the ballroom floor.
‘Of course that’s what they do,’ she told The Comfort Eating podcast with Grace Dent. ‘Some of these stories are from the teenage years… bam, bam, bam. A little bit of a shimmy. Yes, it goes on.’
Shirley recently confessed that she is afraid to leave the house after receiving cruel abuse from internet trolls.
Speaking in new ITVX documentary Olivia Attwood vs The Trolls, she said: ‘It’s when it is personal about myself and my family and it affects my mental health. I am not just talking about your phone.
‘I am talking about being in public. You worry about those same strange people that write these kinds of messages. Are they lurking in dark corners? Are they hiding behind walls when you go somewhere?’
Shirley, who sits on the Strictly Come Dancing panel alongside Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse, and Anton Du Beke, pondered leaving the show after getting hundreds of ‘terrible’ letters regarding her decisions to send dancers home.
‘I was struggling. It wasn’t just a little bit, it was a lot – the majority of it was in silence,’ she said. ‘I felt the abuse snowballed out of control and impacted me in such a negative way. I’m a pretty stoic person, and I tend to hold everything in.’
Strictly Come Dancing continues Saturday and Sunday on BBC One and iPlayer.
