AJ Pritchard has opened up about his time on Strictly Come Dancing, revealing that he would be very nervous if he found himself in the middle of the leaderboard with his dancer partner - and would go to some lengths to make sure he and his celebrity partner were safe in the competition!
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Chatting to HELLO! about the latest episode of the 2022 series, the dancing pro revealed that he once bent the rules of the show to stick in the viewers’ minds.
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He explained: "I don't know if I should say this out loud in public, but it was either if one week my celebrity is going to be like at the top [of the leaderboard], safe, then that’s all cool. But if it was going to be in the middle, I'd be so worried. I’d be like, 'We need to be at the top, so we're guaranteed nobodies going to vote for us at home… or right at the bottom. So everybody's worried about us, so they're going to vote and save us. You can't be middle of the road. Middle of the road is like the worst place to ever be."
Mollie appeared on the show in 2017
He continued: "Okay, so with Mollie King, I have the perfect example with Molly. I love her to bits, but we went on the storyline, we went on the personality. I think it was in the semifinal, we were given a rumba and it was right at that crucial point.
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I thought, 'Well, we can't exactly do a basic rumba because it's not going to really hit home and we probably won’t get votes and the judges aren't going to like it. So let’s get a giant pier, you jump off the pier, I’ll catch you, we’ll spin for ten spins, we’ll probably get told off for it and I'll lower you to the floor and make it a real love story.
"I remember all the pros being like, 'That’s a lift! How did you not get penalised for that lift?' And then everyone at home was like, 'That was just so emotional. It was so good!'" I was like, 'If we’re going to do it, let’s do a lift, get a little slap on the wrist but we’ll get through.'"
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