By Elizabeth Cotton
Copyright manchestereveningnews
As Strictly Come Dancing arrives back on our screens, the cosy glow of the BBC ballroom welcomes 15 new famous faces ready to take on the dancefloor. The hit show first graced our screens back in 2004, and has been a staple in households across the UK ever since. Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman are returning as hosts, along with the fabulous judging panel with Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse, Shirley Ballas and Anton Du Beke. Chris Robshaw was confirmed as the eighth contestant on Strictly on Scott Mills BBC Radio 2 Show. He first joined his childhood club, Harlequins RFC, straight out of school and became captain at 23 years old. He earned 66 caps for England and captained the national team 43 times, leading them to a Six Nations Grand Slam victory in 2016. Upon joining the line-up for 2025, he admitted: “This is about as far out of my comfort zone as it gets! I’m hoping to take my dad dancing to a whole new level, and my mum can’t wait to drag me along to her Zumba class. Let’s see if a rugby sidestep works in the Cha Cha Cha.” This isn’t his first television rodeo, as he previously participated in Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2024, where he was medically withdrawn due to injury. At the time, he took to his Instagram and wrote: “Game over. A short and sweet @sas_whodareswins experience. Gutted to be medically discharged. “What an adventure, the challenges were out of this world and grateful to have taken some of them on. Awesome to meet some fun and lively characters along the way which definitely made the experience much more entertaining in the cold times. “For those asking the shoulder is all fine now, had surgery and got it fixed again, hopefully for the last time (we filmed about 16 months ago so all good now)”. During his time on Celebrity SAS, Chris opened up about the death of his father, Alan, when he was just five years old. He died at 40-years-old from a heart attack and Chris had gone to a birthday party, and his dad never showed to pick him up. Chris recalled: “I was the last one waiting to be picked up and then there was this phone call to say he’d died”. Following his father’s death, Chris channelled his grief and anger from his dyslexia, that made school troublesome, into sport. He shared: “It was a way of expressing a certain amount of aggression and frustration. And I was also very dyslexic so didn’t want to be in the classroom. But I realise now I was bottling up so much. I loved sport but it was also grief management.” In 2021, Chris set up the Kerslake Robshaw Foundation. It offers grants to young people trying to make it in sport and music, who have often been setback by a personal tragedy. Chris tied the knot to Camilla Kerslake in 2018 in a humanist ceremony in Provence and welcomed their first child together in 2021, a son called Wilding. Camilla is a classical singer who was previously signed to Gary Barlow’s record company in 2009, and she’s appeared in various West End musicals, including Les Misérables. Their second son, Hunter, was born last year after the couple relocated to America for Chris’ rugby career. Reflecting on his “serendipitous” meeting with Camilla, he recalled: “We first met at a charity dinner in a fancy hotel – I was there in a rugby capacity and Camilla, who was doing the sports circuit at the time, was there to perform. When I saw her on stage I thought: this person is extremely talented and also very good looking. “As I walked out of the venue to go home, she happened to be passing in the other direction and we basically bumped into each other. It was incredibly serendipitous – if I had stayed at my table for one more drink, we would never have met.” After Chris’ appearance on Strictly was confirmed, Camilla took to her Instagram and joked: “When you’re used to being a rugby widow, but *now” you’re a Strictly widow”, and added: “It’s the same but with less mud and more glitter”.
