As the new series of Strictly begins we know it terrifyingly signifies the countdown to Christmas!
Yet it brings so much joy to our televisions again and some Saturday night sparkle as the nights begin to draw in is never a bad thing.
So, who better to hear from this month than former Strictly winner and Derbyshire lad, actor Tom Chambers.
Tom is recognised for a host of high profile roles, from his acting breakthrough role as Sam Strachan in Holby City, to playing Max Tyler in Waterloo Road.
He has also just filmed the latest series of the hugely successful and charming Father Brown, where he plays Inspector Sullivan.
But for the Strictly faithful he will always be remembered as a winner in the days of Len Goodman and Arlene Philips as judges, and Craig Revell-Horwood still being vicious with his comments - telling Tom with a wry smile backstage ‘I’ve done you a favour with that cutting remark. The audience will be incensed now and vote for you!’
‘It’s very much a pantomimic performance from the judges,’ Tom tells me, reminiscing about his wonderful Strictly experience. ‘It’s all part and parcel of why we love it so much.’
He decided to apply for the Royal Variety Show and proposed his act to be a recreation of the famous dance where Fred Astaire tap dances with a drum kit in the movie Damsel in Distress.
Tom was told to video it for them to consider but it took 5,000 hours to film frame by frame, which you can still find on YouTube, which meant he was too late for the Royal Variety as they had booked up all their acts by the time he had finished!
He instead sent the video to as many agents and producers he could. That’s when he was invited to audition for Holby City.
He was walking through the maze at Chatsworth with a friend when he got the call to say he had got the part.
‘It completely changed my life overnight,’ he tells me. ‘But it had taken six years to get to that point.’
It is clear, as we continue our conversation, that the Derbyshire lad is still in there.
Tom may have worked on his RP and diluted the accent through his acting career but he still loves to hear ‘mi duck’ when he regularly comes back home to visit his dad, who is still in Parwich, near Ashbourne, where the family moved when he was a toddler.
I notice his Derbyshire accent starts creeping back when Tom starts regaling memories from his childhood there, where his school was literally the other side of the wall from his house.
‘We had proper winters in Parwich,’ he smiles. ‘I would jump over the wall and throw buckets of water on the playground at night so we could skate on the ice the following morning!’
Tom remembers the village Wakes, the hill race and the freedom as a child when he would go out for hours on his bike and friends on the Tissington trail.
He would take his pet mouse to school in his pocket, and he positively salivates thinking about Mrs Rawling’s amazing school dinners and lemon meringue pie!
‘It was truly an idyllic childhood’, he recollects fondly.
Tom’s deep roots in our wonderful county come from a mum who was born and bred Derbyshire and a dad who was a Derby man.
For Tom, the acting bug happened by accident as he and his school mates were playing football and told by the teacher that it was compulsory to audition for the school play.
Tom got the part of Dracula in Dracula Spectacular and recalls ‘there was a line where I had to interact with the audience and I remember thinking “this feels quite normal to be doing this”’.
He joined the National Youth Musical Theatre, performing at Edinburgh Festival and eventually moving to drama school.
Tom’s first proper audition came for a small part on The Bill but he was told he needed to drive a truck so would need an HGV licence.
It just so happened his Derbyshire childhood had afforded him the freedom of going to the local quarry and spending time as a lorry driver’s cabin mate from the age of five or six!
He was even allowed to use the CB radio and remembers his old CB name, ‘Little Turbo’.
I ask if the name ever made a comeback, maybe as his wife’s pet name for him? He seems relieved it never stuck!
So, Tom decided to use those childhood connections and came back to Ashbourne to get his HGV licence.
Not only did it help with the role on The Bill, he also got lorry driving work between acting jobs and even received a letter from the Government during Covid, as a former HGV driver, as they needed more lorry drivers to get supplies around the country - so he went back to do his bit.
Back to Strictly Come Dancing then, where Tom got to show the nation his long-held dancing passions and ability.
He won the 2008 series with partner Camilla Delarup and went on, three years later, to get the part of Fred Astaire in the West End debut of Top Hat.
Tom also married his old school friend, and seeming soul mate, during that Strictly series.
When they left school he told Clare ‘I’d like to marry you one day’. He was thinking once university was done and they had lived a little, but it actually took near death experiences to truly become an item.
Tom’s sister had moved to Kenya and the whole family were going over to visit her. Tom had to take a different plane to the others.
‘On this particular flight a mad man tried to hijack and crash the plane,’ Tom tells me. ‘It was terrifying.’
He later discovered they were four minutes from the point of no return.
‘There was a cacophony of passengers frantically praying in their own languages and I suddenly realised I may never see Clare again,’ he tells me.
That’s when he knew how much she meant to him. Their friendship was reignited when he confessed to her, but it didn’t become romantic until Clare had her own near-death experience when she was run over by a taxi at a crossing and was knocked unconscious.
When she came to, the first person she thought of was Tom. Their relationship truly began in 2006 and they married during Strictly in 2008.
As our charming chat draws to a close, I ask Tom Chambers if he can tell me in a nutshell what Derbyshire means to him.
‘To me, Derbyshire means pure mental health, with character, with the countryside and fresh air,’ he concludes.
‘The people have such character and personality. It’s a place that’s very earthy, very rooted, with the quarries and the lorries but the countryside, hills and trails.
‘To go on a walk in the fresh air down Milldale or Dovedale… Derbyshire is medicine in a bottle.’
