Ed Balls has revealed his wife Yvette Cooper saved him from accidentally playing a 'paedophile' when he appeared on Strictly Come Dancing.
The 57-year-old former politician, who is now a regular presenter on Good Morning Britain, was on the BBC show back in 2016. He lasted until week 10 – just missing out on a spot in the quarter-finals with partner Katya Jones.
While he delighted fans with his Gangnam Style, which went down as one of the show’s most iconic moments of all time, he almost made a massive faux pas if he had gone ahead with another number.
Speaking about his time on the show on the Walking The Dog With Emily Dean podcast, Ed confessed that partner Katya had told him he needed to loosen up a bit and ‘let go’ after a ‘cautious’ week one.
Week two was movie week and the pair were due to dance to the Jerry Lee Lewis song Great Balls Of Fire, which is also a film. But when Ed told wife Yvette – who is now the Home Secretary – about it, she urged him to turn it down.
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Explaining why, Ed told the podcast: “They wanted me to do Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls Of Fire for movie week. They wanted me to come down from the ceiling in a flaming piano. But two in the morning and we’re driving back from Elstree [studios] and Yvette’s on her phone and she says, ‘Do you know this movie, where you’re going to assume the lead character, you do realise that the biopic it’s based upon is where he has an affair with his 13-year-old cousin.’
“She said, ‘I think that makes Katya the 13-year-old and you the paedophile – I think this is a bad idea. So I said, ‘Oh my God’. I rang the producers on Sunday morning at 10am and said, ‘I don’t think I can do this one.’ They said, ‘Give us an hour.’ And they came back and said, ‘We want you to do The Mask, Jim Carrey and Cuban Pete, the Samba.’ I said, ‘Only if I can have a green face, do not do it by halves, let me be Jim Carrey, the mask with the green face’. That was fabulous – the green makeup was so cool. It took three people 50 minutes.”
Jerry Lee Lewis, who died in 2022 at the age of 87, was a rock ‘n’ roll rival to Elvis Presley back in the day. Legend has it that one point he drove to Graceland high on drink and drugs with a gun on his dashboard and called him out, allegedly saying: “Come out and we’ll soon find out who’s King.”
But despite many scandals in his life – including marrying his 13-year-old cousin Myra Gale Brown when he was 23 in 1957 – he continued to perform for 60 years. The musician had insisted that Myra was closer to 15, but when newspapers in Britain, where he was touring, discovered the truth there was uproar. After just three performances his tour in the UK was cancelled and he was booed off stage. In the states his career also took a huge dive and he was shunned.
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