Boosting a man’s ego, Strictly style

There’s nothing like an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing to bring the colour back to the cheeks of a retired political editor – particularly if you are the terminally unfit John Sergeant, 64, and the BBC One gods have paired you with a Christina Aguilera lookalike.

“I think when my journalist colleagues see Kristina [Rihanoff] they’ll be very annoyed,” boasts the former ITV correspondent. “When I saw her, I thought this is going to be all right. Huw Edwards – he’ll be desperate to do it. Obviously, it helps to be at the end of your news journalist career.”

It certainly beats being bundled out of Margaret Thatcher’s path by Bernard Ingham.

Rihanoff, a Siberian-born mambo specialist, will not be giving her partner an easy ride. “I have students of John’s age and even older. So I know how to deal with that,” she notes icily. “You just have to be very patient, kind of slowly build the confidence and train them up.”

Sergeant joins Phil Daniels (see The Face, below), Jodie Kidd and the Olympian Mark Foster in the Strictly spotlight. “I want my partner to have a mind like a parachute,” concludes Kristina. “Open and ready to do anything.” Let’s hope that John doesn’t tumble to earth too hard.

— It sounds like one of Nessa’s tall stories. Ruth Jones, the star of Gavin and Stacey, has thanked workers at a recycling plant for saving her pet tortoise from a crushing end.

Tom, 55, was spotted on the conveyor belt at the Cardiff City Council facility. He had already survived the rotating spikes section of the plant and had travelled through a glass crusher. “Another two minutes and he would have been mincemeat. We really thought we had lost him,” said Jones, who led a five-week search for the chelonian, a friend since childhood, after he climbed into a recycling bag.

“We get some incorrect materials coming through here, but it is the first time for a tortoise,” Paul Cowling, a plant worker, said.

This week The Times reported the safe return of Fred, 30, another wandering tortoise, who was found at a landfill site. The RSPCA tells homeowners to look out for animals when disposing of garden waste.

— That famed linguist Victoria Beckham let The New Yorker in on the secret behind the Hebrew lettering tattooed on her neck when she attended a party with the designer Marc Jacobs. “It’s in Jewish,” she explained. “My husband’s part Jewish.” The New Yorker’s fact checkers bowed to her knowledge. Mrs B then described Jacobs’s collections as “diametrically opposed, yet completely signature”.

— “We seem to be a bit thin on prizes,” sniffed Roger Waters, Pink Floyd’s chief strategist, accepting the Polar Music Prize from the King of Sweden. The band had never received a Grammy, complained Waters. He must have overlooked the Grammy awarded for Marooned, an instrumental from Pink Floyd’s Waters-free album The Division Bell. A momentary lapse, perhaps?

— If music be the food of love . . . The Globe Theatre is entering the music business with a series of CDs offering new music in a period setting. The first album, Elizabethan Street Songs , features Sting-friendly instruments such as the sackbut, archlute and hurdy-gurdy. Shakespeare’s Lovers , the follow-up, includes the poet’s sonnets. Sir Ian McKellen, who has recorded a “rap sonnet”, may appear.

The Face: Phil Daniels

Amid the sequins and drama on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing, Phil Daniels is set to bring an earthy bonhomie to proceedings. A mod icon from his breakthrough role in The Who’s rock opera Quadrophenia (1979), Daniels, 49, cemented his status as a “lads icon” with a Britpop-defining vocal on Blur’s Parklife.

The Londoner’s only reservation when cast as Kevin Wicks in EastEnders was that he might be hassled in the pub.

This London Marathon runner and lifelong Chelsea FC fan surely has the stamina and charm to win the danceathon.

“I can do the mashed potato, the watusi and I can dive off a balcony,” he says. Daniels, who is a graduate of the borstal drama Scum, also nurses an ambition to be the next Doctor Who.

Postscript

Mark Borkowski, the PR “guru”, released his book The Fame Formula last month: reviewers at The Scotsman weren’t very keen. Borkowski responded by sending them some, er, pigs’ anuses that he “got for free down at Spitalfields market”. He even tied a bow round the box. The reviewers sent back a philosophical treatise on the virtues of humour, fidelity, tolerance, love and courage. Whatever happened to taking criticism on the chin? Parliament’s rock band, MP4, may not be very rock’n’roll but at least they’re honest. “Every politician is a failed rock star,” Andy Burnham, the Culture Secretary, tells Q magazine.

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