Arlene Phillips: ‘People say Strictly should never have fired me’
“It was funny to me, all that noise around the costume Sabrina Carpenter wore at the Brit Awards,” says Dame Arlene Phillips. “Bra, corset, stockings and suspenders. That was the kind of sensual costume we wore in Hot Gossip back in the 1970s! I thought: ‘My gosh! Times haven’t changed, have they?’ People are still shocked by somebody performing on TV in the equivalent of a bikini – an outfit that millions of women chose to wear all over most of the world without thinking twice…”
I can almost hear the eyeroll as the 82-year-old choreographer and former Strictly Come Dancing judge talks on the phone from her home in North London. Producers famously spent three years dismissing her own dance troupe, Hot Gossip, as “fantastic to watch but too sexy for television” before they finally landed a primetime ITV slot on The Kenny Everett Video Show from 1978 to 1981. She encouraged pop stars from Whitney Houston to Elton John to bop for the cameras. So she allies herself firmly with the 26-year-old Carpenter, relishing the way the pop star has gleefully winked off the slut-shaming that came her way after some commentators tried to paint her as the blonde who stole Olivia Rodrigo’s man.
“The pressure on women, preventing them from being who they want to be, is quite extraordinary,” continues Phillips. “But Sabrina Carpenter is clearly such a clever, confident, witty woman! How dare people tell her she has no right to wear something so provocative…” She pauses. “Nobody should be made to wear that sort of thing if they are uncomfortable. Of course not. But it is her choice, what she puts on display.”
Sexually assertive female characters – little but fierce – are on Phillips’s mind because she’s currently working as movement coordinator for a revival of Nicholas Hytner’s immersive, gender-flipping production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at London’s Bridge Theatre. First staged in 2019, the festival of a production sees the fairy king and queen speaking each other’s lines, with Oberon falling head over heels for Bottom’s ass while Titania looks on and laughs.
Phillips – who coached both casts through some magical dancing, gymnastics and aerial work – says it’s “even more interesting because although the lines are gender-swapped, the visuals and movement are not. The way the chemistry twists and swirls around is really quite unique. We use a lot of aerial work. Puck pretty much lives in the air, as do the fairies.”
She’s surprised and disheartened by the way that “gender and sexuality has become such a bitter, harsh and… unhelpful” subject of public debate in the six years since the original production picked up uncontroversial five-star reviews for its playful fluidity. “There are so many things in the world to worry about. Wars and poverty and pollution… this doesn’t need to be one of them. Let’s bring joy to all the people needing it. They may not be on the path we’re on, but let’s support them on theirs.”
Phillips – who has two daughters and two granddaughters – has always believed that “it’s important to stay open-minded. I’ve always been willing to listen and learn.” She recalls an old friend who had twins assigned male at birth. “From the moment one of those children came into the world, all he loved was pink. He only wanted to play with paper dolls. He was lucky to be raised in a household with people who just embraced everything he wanted and so their life is happy.” She tells me she has no issues about who uses the ladies’ loos : “You get used to sharing in the theatre, where the real problem is not which toilet but that there are never enough.”
Born in Prestwich, Lancashire, in 1943, Phillips has experience of feeling she was born in the “wrong” body. The barber’s daughter grew up wanting to be a ballerina but quickly realised she was “not physically a classical dancer. I was fairly short, strong and quite stocky. I could jump and turn like the boys but didn’t have the beautiful extensions required of the girls.”
It was only “standing and watching a production of West Side Story at the Manchester Opera House” that made her realise that another, punchier style of dance might suit her better. When a local am-dram company mounted a production of the musical – “one of the first amateur versions in the UK”, she reckons – Phillips landed herself a role as one of the male gang members.
Phillips’s dreams of training in London were stalled when her mother died of leukaemia when she was just 15. Her father became ill shortly afterwards. While her elder brother went out to work, teenage Arlene stayed home to help raise her younger sister and initially studied (and taught) dance in Manchester instead. It wasn’t until the early 70s that she came down to London where Molly Molloy gave her a scholarship to her contemporary jazz school: “She told me nobody else had come close to understanding the detail of using their body in the way she wanted.”
Determined not to return home, fireball Phillips worked her socks off in London. “I had to be in Dagenham at 6:30 in the morning, folding greatcoats shipped from wars around the world and sold on a vintage market in Chelsea. They stank of mothballs so that by the time I got to dance class nobody wanted to stand near me. Then in the evenings I would work in a late-night cafe.”
Molloy also introduced Phillips to Ridley Scott (then running a TV commercial company), who employed her as a nanny and helped her find her feet in the TV industry.
“Ridley was brilliant,” she recalls. “He wasn’t the Hollywood god then that he would become. But I have never known anybody work the hours he worked. So much energy and enthusiasm. He took my first headshots.” She formed Hot Gossip in 1974 (keeping the troupe running until 1986) and quickly picked up work choreographing for the theatre and bringing pizzazz to the new genre of pop videos, showing musicians (including Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Freddie Mercury and Duran Duran) how to strut their stuff for the cameras.
“I remember Whitney Houston coming in to make the video for ‘How Will I Know?’ [1985] and she was so shy,” she recalls. “She was extremely uncomfortable with movement. But by the time she came in to make ‘I wanna Dance With Somebody’ [1987], she had absolutely changed and wanted to embrace everything she could do. She wanted more and more choreography. That was quite delightful, just encouraging her to walk to a beat, to use her arms.”
More intimidating was Diana Ross, who arrived on the set of the video for “Chain Reaction” with an imperious attitude. “She was all ‘Call me Miss Ross!’ with everyone. But our brilliant director said, ‘Arlene! Come to her dressing room with me!’ He banged on the door and her hairdresser opened it, kind of shocked when he insisted on speaking to Diana. When she appeared he said, ‘Diana, everyone in the studio is going to call you Miss Ross except for me and Arlene. Because: why waste time using two words when we can use one?’” How did she react? “She laughed!”
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Putting musicians through their paces gave Phillips an insight into the work of the pros when she was appointed one of the original judges on Strictly in 2004. There was a huge outcry when the BBC replaced the veteran choreographer (then 66) with previous season winner, 30-year-old Alesha Dixon , in 2009. The show’s male judges – then aged between 44 and 65 – all kept their jobs. The corporation denied ageism, but it received over 2,000 complaints from the public, and columnists across the media called out a culture that gave women on telly a brutal sell-by date . Then deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman called the BBC’s decision “absolutely shocking” and suspected “age discrimination”.
Phillips – who only heard that she had been “uninvited to return” when a journalist called her home for comment – says today she wasn’t aware that her sacking marked a turning point in British showbiz.
“I guess I… I didn’t notice it that much at the time,” she mulls. “I wrapped myself in my world and got on with life.” I feel that while Phillips took an awful hit, her firing caused producers to rethink the value of older women on TV. She’s not keen to comment but does say that people approach her “all the time to say, ‘You should never have gone!’”
She’s amused by the fact that people often confuse her with her good friend Shirley Ballas (64), who replaced the late Len Goodman as Strictly ’s head judge in 2017. “People come running up shouting ‘Shirley! Shirley!’ and I have to say, ‘No, I’m the other one!’” She’s also still friends with Craig Revel Horwood – “We go way back!” – and continues to watch Strictly “in bits and pieces on catch-up. It’s rare I’d sit still on a Saturday night for a couple of hours but I’m also close to Jason Gilkison and I love watching the big dance numbers he’s created.”
Although she has slowed down and prioritises spending time with her granddaughters – “they both dance, but there’s no pressure” – Phillips has no plans to retire any time soon. “Why would I, when there are so many interesting opportunities out there?” she asks. “New ideas keep you young.”
‘ A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is on at the Bridge Theatre, London, until 20 August ( bridgetheatre.co.uk )
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