Laura Whitmore:
I’m still not ready to talk in depth about my experience on the show. I love dancing - I topped the leaderboard twice – but before it even began, I was thrown into the lion’s den and into the middle of someone’s break-up that had nothing to do with me. Once again, I was a ‘rumoured love interest’.
I was placed with a dance partner I was extremely uncomfortable with – and in the end I felt broken. I cried every day. And I really was broken, both mentally and physically, by the end. To the outside world I tried to suck it up and smile, and I did that to the best of my ability, but it affected me deeply. My friends and family knew that I was struggling. And they were there for me. The media, however, saw me as blonde bait in a sequinned dress.
How have we sunk to this level, where women are routinely reduced, and demeaned, in this way? It is impossible to understand, when everything about it is so wrong, so misguided and so vile.
--------------------12-4-18
“What I didn’t like was being removed from everybody and having to spend 12 hours a day with this one person. It did not become about the dancing. I just wanted to dance. I did not want to play the game of doing red carets with your dance partner and stuff like that, which a lot of people thought you should be doing. I did not want to do that.”
-----------------------13-4-20
The producers did her wrong. She was meant to be with Brendan iirc but when Gio and Georgia split, they swapped her for Anastacia.
Hoping for drama, headlines and two singletons getting it on at the expense of her bf. Gio was a fan of Anastacia. She and Brendan famously did not hit it off that well (she is in touch witth many from the show, but not him). Height-wise Laura would have been a better fit for Brendan. She has ability - she was on the lateish show alongside Ugo and had natural rhythm. But they took her chance of a good experience like Charlotte had and made her into, as she says, 'blonde bait'. No wonder she seems bitter about the whole shebang.