“I play Uno with my daughter to teach her how to deal with failure in life.”

I won’t lie last two weeks were pretty tough – tougher than my home fries and it’s damn tough. We now have seven live shows under our belt, which is five more than I thought I could last and six more than I would have lasted on MasterChef with those tricky hams.

For the first five performances, my professional dance partner Dianna Buswell and I had a lot of fun and really succeeded in wowing the studio audience and viewers at home. However, the last two shows were a bit of a different reality as we had samba and tango back to back, which is like double Latin followed by double detention at school, and that’s not a good day for anyone. This?

Both Samba and Tango very technical dancingand they were missing the opportunity to achieve some of the wow factor that we were able to include in these previous five weeks. No lifting, no truly impressive standout moments, no emotion, just a checklist of technicalities to be accomplished simultaneously and against the natural instincts of this 47-year-old’s relatively inadequate body.

The judges’ scores meant we finished last week on the leaderboard with our Samba and just one place better, finishing second from bottom with our Tango. I think we’ve been carrying a lot of pressure with us this past week, which probably made it a little difficult for us to have fun, and on top of that, Tango is moody, so we weren’t even allowed to smile, since outward expressions of amusement or joy are strictly prohibited in the grumpy world of Tango. You need to make a face like you’d rather do anything but fucking tango.