Ashley Banjo On How Dance Feels Like ‘Therapy’ – And Keeps Him Tee-Total

Dance also helped Banjo process the death of his nan, who died from cancer in 2015 just before he was set to go on Diversity’s ‘Up Close And Personal’ tour. He choreographed a routine in her memory and spoke about her death on stage, alongside his brother, Jordan, who’s also part of the troupe. 

“It was a way to honour her memory, but it ended up being a bit of therapy really,” he says. “For every night of 50 or 60 shows, we got to dance it and by the end we felt 100 times better about it and like we’d told people. To this day, I feel like it really helped me to deal with it all.” 

While the good outweighs the bad, Banjo acknowledges there’s a downside to dancing at his level. “I’m my harshest critic,” he says. “I know how a good performance feels, so unless it’s like that, it can really make me down. I hate the feeling of a bad performance, it’s the worst feeling in the world.”

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But without dance, he wouldn’t have met his wife, Francesca Abbott, who’s due to give birth to their first child this month. The pair met when he was 16 and she was 18, when Abbott signed up for his dance class. 

Abbot doesn’t dance regularly anymore, but Banjo jokes she sometimes sneaks into Diversity rehearsals to learn a quick routine – and he says the pair are “always dancing around and being stupid” at home. In this way, he argues, everyone can enjoy the benefits of dance.

“It doesn’t have to be big and shiny,” he says. “It can be really intimate just between two people and still be really powerful.”

The ‘Flirty Dancing’ finale is on Thursday 7 February at 10pm on Channel 4. Catch up on All 4.