Strictly’s Shirley Ballas reveals she has joined famous dating app - and what age brackets she's looking at

“There are others,” she continues. “‘Hang your problems at the door, pick them up on your way out’, ‘There should be no regrets in life, only lessons,’ and, ‘It’s all sent to test us’. I’ve used them because they are specialities of my 88-year-old mother Audrey, the woman who built the very foundations of my resilience.”

Her latest book (she also has a successful line in cosy crime novels) is, she explains, a “continuation” of her 2020 autobiography Behind the Sequins: My Life. “I didn’t have the confidence back then to write some of the things that I’ve written now,” she says. “I’ve written about what’s happened in my life recently, but I’ve brought in a few other stories as well. I wanted it to be a collection of life lessons in confidence, resilience and self-belief, inspired by the world of dance.”

It’s fair to say that she has needed all three of those qualities since that first autobiography five years ago: since then, she has called off an engagement, later ending that relationship; coped with her mother’s cancer scare; received counselling and support from the BBC in the wake of severe online trolling; and lived with the attention of a stalker, a situation that ultimately required legal intervention. All this while dealing with the menopause which, she writes, took her to “some terrible places in my head... there were times when I thought I’d be better off dead”.

In response to all the above, and with no intention of living with a partner again, she has joined the exclusive members-only dating app Raya (“The age bracket I’ve gone for is fairly broad, but not too young. I reckon anything from 55 to 70 if they’re fit. Up to 98 if they’re loaded!” she jokes), looked fear in the face and, she reveals in her book, started bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT) to counter the effects of the menopause and begin “to feel like my old self again.” Confidence, resilience and self-belief? Check.

Beyond the response to her own personal circumstances, Ballas – who turns 65 on 6 September – feels that Strictly has given her a platform that confers a certain responsibility. “People on Instagram are always asking me questions about various things like the menopause,” she says. “So I thought it might help people to log and write down some of what I’ve experienced through life to show that they are not alone.

“Maybe because of social media, people tend to be happy to talk about their feelings. It wasn’t that way when I was younger, everything was a little bit more bottled-up, even more so in my mother’s era. She still can’t understand why I talk about some of the things I do in the book.” Ballas smiles, before following her own advice from the “Adaptability” chapter – or “step” as she calls them – to “Master the Transitions” and talk about the death of her brother David, who took his own life in 2003.

Ballas writes and talks movingly about the loss of her sibling. “I don’t care too much for my own company because it means I have to be alone with my thoughts… every ‘what if’ I’ve tried so hard to bury resurfaces and my mind takes me back to my brother and all the things I could and should have done differently. If I’d had a better understanding of mental health… if I hadn’t invited my mother down to London, leaving him on his own.”

She is now a passionate advocate for mental health awareness and a supporter of the charities CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) and Suicide&Co. She discusses this in the “Survival” step, “Accept the Rise and Fall” – something you experience with the waltz and foxtrot. Did she ever consider dance as a form of therapy in itself? “I’ve been dancing since I was two years old,” she explains. “So it wouldn’t necessarily be therapeutic for me, but when David died I did just get on with the dancing.”

Of course she did. Shirley Ballas doesn’t know how to stop. She has a dancer’s urge for perpetual motion. An itch that will be scratched by the new series of Strictly, which she promises will have (as well as two new professional dancers) “a few small changes and extra things added which I can’t talk about at the moment – but one thing I can confirm is how much I’m looking forward to working with the amazing cast this year.”

As her mother Audrey puts it, “You can’t go back and start a new beginning, but you can write a new ending”.

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