Chris McCausland will take to the Strictly Come Dancing ballroom for a very special dance tonight with partner Dianne Buswell.
The pair are one of nine couples fighting for a place in the annual Blackpool special next week. It's been a rocky few weeks for Chris and Dianne who found themselves at the bottom of the leader board last week but avoided the dance off.
Following the news he'd made it through to another week, Chris took to X, formerly known as Twitter, and said: "If I'm honest, I was quite down on myself in that interview clip straight after the dance that was on the results show tonight because I thought I had made a pretty big mistake. I realised later that I hadn't. I'm feeling good. Thank you for all of your support! X#Strictly."
Tonight the pair will return for a Couple's Choice routine to Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) by John Lennon. Writing in his Telegraph column, Chris said the routine was an :an opportunity to do something that is a little outside the box and with a little more of a personal meaning." He explained: "Myself and Dianne will be dancing to Instant Karma by John Lennon, a song that I believe sends out a beautifully positive message that we are all as valuable as each other and that kindness should be the most basic of our traits."
He went on: "I am here on Strictly to try to show that more can be possible than many might think. I’m even surprising myself in that regard, but for me this song fits my purpose here perfectly, to try to show that we can all shine as brightly as each other if we only allow ourselves and each other to do so. Myself and Dianne will be hoping to shine brightly on the dance floor this Saturday night, and I’m looking forward to actually being able to smile this time."
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BBC)The dance is set to be one of the performances of the series for Chris who has already been hailed as an inspiration by viewers. The comedian is the first blind contestant ever to star on the BBC dance series.
Chris lost his sight at the age of 22 due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which results in the gradual degeneration of the light sensitive cells of the retina.
The funnyman said he had been slowly going blind since he was born and didn't even notice.
Opening up about his condition, Chris told i News last year: "My grandmother had it, and my mum. Basically, I'd been going blind very slowly since I was born, and so didn't even really notice it happening. Like the frog in the pan of boiling water," he added.
Chris said his other senses suffered as a result of his blindness as he cleared up a big misconception. They say that when you lose your sight, your hearing gets better. It doesn't. But you do pay more attention to it. So when you're sat at a beach resort, and you're hot, and you can't see what's around you, then you just end up concentrating on how hot you actually are. I suffer more for it."
Chris and his wife Patricia do not know whether their daughter, Sophie, ten, will develop retinitis pigmentosa like her dad. "If the genome was a map of the United Kingdom, they think my problem is maybe somewhere in south west London but they haven't narrowed it down to a specific gene yet," Chris said. "But it meant that when my daughter was born we wanted to know whether she would have it and of course, there’s just no test there's nothing.
"The analogue tests they do now are a lot more technological, they can check the electrical signals of the optic nerve as you're looking at things and see whether it's as strong as it should be and all these kinds of things, but nothing definitive. It's all just wait and see," he explained.
Speaking to Brighton Magazine, Chris opened up about what it was raising a child while registered blind. "As my daughter has got older and more communicative, being a blind Dad has got easier in lots of ways. There was a really difficult period when she was a one-year old, where she was mobile but silent, crawling about on the floor but hardly making a bloody peep! Looking back, maybe I should have put a bell on her, or a bluetooth tracker so that I could ask Alexa to find her! Now she's five though, it's probably things like not being able to help her properly with her reading and her writing. How many of the other kids in her class have already got better handwriting than their Daddy?"
Chris' daughter is one of his biggest supporters on the show, but even he admitted at the beginning she was not keen on the idea of him taking part. When he first told his family and friends about his new gig, Chris said: "Everyone I knew was like, 'How are you going to do that?'. Even my daughter said to me, 'No, daddy you'll fall off the stage and break your leg!'"
"If anybody out there is thinking 'how the hell is he going to do that?' then rest assured that I am thinking exactly the same thing," Chris joked ahead of the series.
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