In today’s Sunday Times, written by India Knight:
Of course she’s a wonderful dancer, so light and airy on her feet that she recalls the golden age of Hollywood musicals. Sometimes she seems to float in mid-air.
And of course, as her partner Giovanni Pernice said, she has had to work five times as hard as anyone else because her deafness means she couldn’t hear the music, relying instead on a combination of counting and absolute trust. All this with good humour and not a peep of complaint.
But the main thing about Rose Ayling-Ellis, 27, who lifted the Strictly Come Dancing trophy on Saturday night after 13 weeks and 16 gruelling dances, is how deeply she has moved everyone watching her. We weren’t moved out of pity at her deafness: Ayling-Ellis is not in any shape or form a pitiable person, but an enviable explosion of joy, vitality, talent and sheer spirit.
No, what was so unprecedentedly emotionally engaging – like Anton Du Beke, I watched many of her dances while spontaneously welling up – was the relationship she and Pernice developed and which informed all of their routines.
What we saw playing out week after week is, literally, the oldest story in the book – the basis of fairy tales, romantic novels, the best and most cherished films and rom-coms: a charming, guileless girl-next-door, fizzing with effervescence and joie de vivre, melts the heart of a more high-glamour, world-weary, cynical man and shifts something within him. The plot twist here is that the ingénue doesn’t get the man, or rather, that she doesn’t get him in the usual predictable way. Instead, she gets him – well, in his soul. No wonder we were all in bits.
As the weeks went by, the audience at home could see Pernice, 31, evolve. He is a man who can rock guyliner and does not shy from campness but who also presents very much as a square-jawed Sicilian macho. His dating history involves influencers and people from Love Island. It seems fair to say that he had not come across anyone like Rose before.
With each passing episode, we could see him thaw, and then melt, and then view the competition in a completely different light, where winning was less important than showcasing and supporting Rose to the utmost. Pernice – in previous series cool, slightly aloof, polite and friendly but essentially just doing his job – turned into a grinning, damp-eyed hyper-enthusiast, hugging Rose at every opportunity, gazing at her adoringly and planting smacking great kisses on her face out of sheer delight at her.
It is a terrible cliché, and one overused by the judges, to say that a professional is proud of an amateur, but Giovanni’s pride in Rose was off the scale, and you could see it beaming out of him.
Tonight, just before their second dance, he cried, and described Rose as “the best thing to ever happen in my life. I want to say thank you for everything. That’s it.”
What made the story even better is that she seemed completely unaware of any of this. She teased him, giggled at him, said, to his mortification, that she could smell his breath when they danced a sexy and intense Argentine tango, and generally gave no impression of realising that she was the agent for what appeared to be a fundamental change in Pernice’s whole being. It was intensely romantic, but with no romance, which made it romantic cubed. It was beautiful to watch.