Strictly Come Dancing's female professionals 'fear' axe for younger dancers

10 March 2024 , 16:24

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Strictly Come Dancing female dancers are in fear they could face the chop over bosses wanting younger dancers

The female professional dancers on Strictly Come Dancing are reportedly in a state of panic over fears they could face the axe.

Ahead of this year's series of the BBC ballroom dancing show, it seems that speculation has mounted over bosses wanting a younger female dancer. This comes after reports surfaced that claimed Nikita Kuzmin might not come back to the contest. When Dianne Buswell, 34, was partnered with 20-year-old Bobby Brazier in the last series, she was mocked over their 14-year age gap. A source said: "Bosses are always keen to cast young celebs to appeal to a younger demographic."

Strictly Come Dancing female dancers are in fear they could face the chop over bosses wanting younger dancers (PA)

They added: "But Bobby and Dianne were subject to some quite nasty trolling and that's made them look again at the pro-line-up," according to the MailOnline. Last week, Dianne spoke about her battle with an eating disorder that made her "terrified" to perform.

Appearing on ITV's This Morning, she bravely explained to hosts Josie Gibson and Craig Doyle: "You wake up in the morning, and the first thing you think of is, what am I going to eat? How many calories are going to be in that? How much do I need to exercise to burn off those calories?"

She added: "It literally is like a planned thing in your mind that doesn't go away. And that's when you start to go, 'Oh, this is a problem because I'm not thinking of anything else'." During the segment, pictures were shown of Dianne looking drastically underweight due to her bulimia. Dianne attributes becoming a dancer at a young age contributed to her eating disorder as it placed pressure on her to keep her weight down.

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She added that "weekly weigh-ins" at her dance academy "terrified her" as a girl and her entire week was centred around that. She added: "I think it comes from when I was quite a young girl. And obviously growing up in the dance world, you're taught to look a certain way and you see all these other beautiful girls dancing.You kind of want to look like that and want to be winning like they are. And they look a certain way so I feel like I should look that way. So I think it was it was something from a really young age."

She continued: "I also went on to dance and dance companies and one of those things was like a weekly weigh-in, and I can't tell you how terrifying that was. And how much that the whole week really was terrifying when you knew that it was coming up." Things got so bad for Dianne that she even considered not dancing anymore as she became "afraid to go on stage."

Dianne has now recovered from bulimia and has decided to share her journey with the public and help those suffering, as she's now written a book titled Eating Disorders Don't Discriminate. The BBC declined to comment.

Lucretia Munro