Comedian Chris McCausland is Strictly Come Dancing's first blind contestant, but that hasn't stopped him wowing the audience with his pro partner Dianne Buswell.
The talented star has swapped the jokes for jazz hands, and banter for ballroom - making it through to Week Five of the coveted contest. On Saturday, Chris, 47, and Dianne, 35, will be dancing a Waltz to 'You'll Never Walk Alone' by Gerry and the Pacemakers, likely inspired by Chris' home city of Liverpool.
But although the star is no doubt serving as an inspiration to visually impaired people everywhere, with his wide-ranging talents, Chris has opened up on the bullying he faced as a youngster.
Speaking on the the Full Disclosure podcast, the dad-of-one opened up about how his condition, retinitis pigmentosa, impacted his life growing up - leading to cruelty from other kids.
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Guy Levy/BBC/PA)He explained: "When you're young, a lot of the memories you have are of trauma or bad things, and not even a trauma from what we could consider to be trauma, but just things that obviously caused distress or stress just to even a moderate degree, they kind of stay burned in your mind."
He went on to add that: "From my point of view, losing your eyesight very, very gradually - it's like the frog in the water - you don't notice the changes, and when you join school when you're four and your eyesight... there's less you need to cope with when you're four years old, you know what I mean? And so the kids around me probably don't notice the slight differences happening that I don't notice happening in terms of struggling to see the blackboard, but I do remember that being a thing."
Chris -who shares 10-year-old Sophia with his wife Patricia - also recalled a particular moment in a school assembly where he was encouraged by a teacher to talk about something new in his life. "I still remember in one school assembly where we had to stand up and say something that we'd got that year and my teacher said, 'Well you should say about your new glasses', and she said, 'But I think you should say spectacles',” he explained.
"And I remember doing this thing and standing up in the class and saying, 'This year I got some new spectacles' and all the other kids laughed.
Chris also revealed that ironically, while as a child he used to loathe people laughing at him, he now wants to have a "full room of people to laugh at me" in his job as a comedian. But no one is laughing at his excellent skills on Strictly - for that its just a room full of applause.
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English (US) ·