Celebrity baker John Whaite is making Strictly Come Dancing history by partnering with another man, and is delighted to be breaking down barriers. “I feel honoured,” he tells Emma Higginbotham
John Whaite is used to being in the TV spotlight. Back in 2012, more than six million people tuned in to watch the then 23-year-old law student win The Great British Bake Off, and this weekend, millions more will see him swap sensible cotton aprons for sequinned synthetics as he sashays onto the dancefloor. He’s half of Strictly Come Dancing’s first all-male couple, pairing with Johannes Radebe, and if anyone feels at home amid the gladrags and glitterballs, it’s John.
“I oscillate between being really excited and absolutely terrified,” admits the 32-year-old. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years and years – I’ve watched it religiously – so I can’t believe it’s finally happening.”
It’s even sweeter for the baking maestro and LGBTQ+ advocate as it came unexpectedly. He shares an agent with BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker, who’d already been offered a contestant slot, and his agent suggested that Strictly’s producers should consider John too. “He said ‘go and meet them, but it won’t happen this year. It never happens like that’.
“So I went to London and I had a dance with Giovanni, which was amazing – he was so sweet and lovely – and I picked up the choreography really quickly. And they said ‘OK, we want you for our first all-male couple’. I was like bloody hell, I can’t believe I’m doing it, let alone being in that very privileged position.” Would he have chosen to dance with another man? “To be honest, I’d have danced with a dog or a parrot,” he grins. “I’d have danced on my own!
“I know that it’s not going to be fully accepted – there are already people saying quite hurtful things – but actually I feel very honoured to do it. Because if I’d had that kind of representation on TV when I was growing up, I don’t think I would have felt half the shame I felt.
“Also it goes beyond that,” he adds. “It’s not just about sexuality, it’s about intimacy between two men. It’s about saying that it’s OK to feel emotions, it’s OK to open up. It doesn’t mean that you are gay if you are intimate with another man, it means that you are a sentient human being. So I hope it breaks down barriers for straight men too.”
Usually based in Leeds, John, his fiancé Paul and their dog, Abel, have decamped to London for the duration of the show – not, he’s quick to point out, that Paul is nervous about the ‘Strictly curse’, which sees contestants falling for their professional partners.
“We’re not worried about it one bit,” he says. “If you have cracks in your relationship, something like this, which is really intense and takes you away from your partner for days at a time, just magnifies the cracks. But we’ve been together for 13 years, and we have a great relationship. He washed my pots during Bake Off and he’ll be sewing me into my DayGlo unitards on Strictly.”
As for how far he’s likely to get in the competition, John admits he’s a good dancer – as a youngster he did ballet, tap and modern – and is looking forward to Latin (“I’m quite the snake-hips,” he confides), but ballroom is another matter. “Ballroom requires a much stiffer shoulder and, over the years, time, tequila and trauma have eroded my posture.
“I just hope and pray that I get through to Halloween Week, because I absolutely love Halloween. It would be great to get through to the final, don’t get me wrong, but for me this is about enjoyment, and it’s an honour just to be doing the first show with another bloke.”
For John, who grew up with his two sisters on a dairy farm near Wigan in Lancashire, the glitz and glamour of Strictly is the culmination of his boyhood dreams. Aged three, all he wanted for Christmas was a wig, “and I used to dress up as a woman. I’d wear Mum’s boob-tube as a dress, put her heels on and click around outside, and nobody batted an eye. Everybody was quite embracing of the fact that I was... expressive.
“I used to love drama as well. When I was four I played the mirror in Snow White: I had to stand on a chair for about two hours, holding this great big piece of wood painted silver with a hole for my face. That’s where my love of performance began.”
Deciding to make it a career, he applied to do a degree in musical theatre, but his parents had other ideas. “They wouldn’t support it. I was a straight-A student and they wanted to nurture that.” Instead he went to Oxford University, but soon dropped out. “I just didn’t fit in. I was a working class farmer’s son, and I didn’t have the self-esteem. I took a year out and went to live in Italy for a while, and went back to Oxford for a second stab a year later, thinking maybe I’ve grown a little bit. But as soon as I got there I realised that I just didn’t want to be there.”
By that time John had met graphic designer Paul on a Facebook dating page, and decided to do a law degree closer to home in Manchester. Until term began he worked at an insurance company which, unbeknown to him, would set the course for his future.
“I remember feeling quite depressed and took a bit of time off work, and had quite a frantic day where I took the Hummingbird Bakery book, and just baked about four or five different items. That’s when I realised the therapeutic power of baking.”
He became hooked – just in time to appreciate a new programme called The Great British Bake Off. After each episode he’d dash to Waitrose, buy the ingredients and stay up into the small hours baking the technical challenge. He started writing a food blog, Flour and Eggs, and beat 7,000 other hopefuls to secure a place on series three of the hit show.
The timing wasn’t great – filming coincided with his finals – but despite being the underdog, he triumphed, winning both the series and first class honours in his degree. “I was wiped out, completely grey, and I slept for 12 hours a day for a couple of weeks, but oh, it was brilliant. It was such a great experience.”
John rode high on his success. He scored a six-figure book deal and was offered “crazy” amounts of money for recipes and work. But as the next batch of Bake Off contestants filtered through, the phone stopped ringing.
“At the back of my mind I knew that lustre and appeal was going to wane, but when it does, it comes with rejections and knock-backs, and it can really scar you,” he says. “I’ve always been prone to depression, but these kinds of things definitely trigger it. It took me a lot of self-reflection and therapy to rationalise it, and to say well, these things happen, and it doesn’t mean you’ve failed.”
At the time, John was also struggling with the eating disorder bulimia, which had begun in his teens. He took solace in writing cookbooks (five in total), completed Le Cordon Bleu’s patisserie diploma and opened a cookery school in a converted barn on the family farm. Ever-keen to please his family, he even had a dramatic career pivot and started training to be a barrister. “Then I got quite ill and depressed, and I missed so many lectures that I couldn’t catch up.
“I realised that I just had to get away. I was feeling suicidal, having really, really scary thoughts, and I had to take some time out to just recalibrate.”
A friend told him about a programme called Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms, where volunteers work the land in exchange for bed and board. Intrigued, in 2019 John headed to a smallholding in the freezing wilds of Canada – an experience that would change him for good.
“I really do think it was fate that took me to Angela and Dan in Canada, because they were strict with routine but they were kind and loving. They taught me so much about myself, about life. And it was wonderful to be around the animals every day. To look after like the cows I had to break the ice, which was two or three-inches thick, on their water trough every morning, and to do something like that for another soul? It makes you realise that when you look after yourself, you’re in a more stable position to look after others.
“So the Canada trip showed me that I can grow and be the man I want to be, and still love people who have different expectations of me. It was a life-saving and life-changing opportunity.”
Life, he says, is still good. “It really is. I’m doing a really great TV show that is a part of who I am – dancing and performing is a huge[italics] part of who I am – but this time I feel as though it’s a celebration. Bake Off was a competition where I wanted to win it, whereas this is a celebration of how far I’ve come in the past 10 years.”
What would little John, in his wig and boob-tube, think of big John now? “I think he’d say ‘you’re smashing it, love’,” he says, his voice cracking. “I think he’d look up to me now and say ‘that’s where I'm going to be in 30 years time and it gives me hope’.
“And I hope there are kids who watch Strictly and see me dancing with another bloke who feel that way as well. I really do. I hope they see it, and think to themselves ‘it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, because I am who I am’.”
WHAITE AND SEE
John began baking with his mum aged five: “Just butterfly cakes and stuff, very rustic and rudimentary, and then I used to come home from school and make microwave cakes – green ones and pink ones. They were like rubber and absolutely gross.”
He has a regular slot on Steph’s Packed Lunch, and once cooked in the nude (with a carefully-placed apron) on the Channel 4 daytime show. His heavy training schedule means he’ll be dropping from two days to one day a week during the Strictly run.
A passionate LGBTQ+ advocate, John created a spectacular layered rainbow cake – with the help of ‘Quarantina Turner’, the KitchenAid he acquired during lockdown – to celebrate Pride Month in June. Find the recipe and video at Waitrose.com.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in September 2021 (c) Waitrose