She’s the woman who beat the ‘curse of Strictly’, the TV jinx that ruins relationships. Faye Tozer entered the BBC competition in 2019 happily married to her husband Michael Smith. Remarkably, she left as joint runner-up three months later, still happily married.
‘I love my family,’ she says when I join her at the West End theatre where she is starring in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. ‘And I wouldn’t let Strictly destroy it.’
Faye Tozer with dance partner Giovanni Pernice on Strictly Come Dancing. Remarkably, she left as joint runner-up three months later, still happily married
There have been 14 victims of a curse that began in 2004 when Brendan Cole and Natasha Kaplinsky, paired together, both split from their partners, but last year’s show caused relationship carnage. Stacey Dooley separated from her boyfriend Sam Tucknott, Joe Sugg’s partner Dianne Buswell split from her boyfriend, Anthony Quinlan, and Seann Walsh was dumped by girlfriend Rebecca Humphries after being photographed kissing dance partner Katya Jones.
‘Strictly is the biggest show on telly,’ says Tozer, who lives with Smith and their son Benjamin, ten, in the North East. ‘But, unfortunately, it can be catastrophic.’ That’s why, before heading south for the show last autumn, she arranged her own Strictly emergency drill. Just in case she became the subject of any scurrilous rumours. ‘We got the family together, Mum and Dad as well, and I said we all need to know how this will work. If anything comes up I will get notified first, then I tell the whole family what has happened, so we all know what’s going to come out [in the press]. That way, if anybody asks, we all know the score. That’s how we protected ourselves.’
Competing in Strictly fulfilled a long-harboured dream for Tozer, 43. ‘I’d been knocking on the door for ten years before my name was put in the hat,’ she says.
But she got it, and three months of tangoing with Giovanni Pernice made Tozer one of the biggest stars in the country, nearly 20 years after she had first known fame in Steps, alongside Ian H Watkins, Claire Richards, Lisa Scott-Lee and Lee Latchford-Evans. The late-Nineties pop band were hugely successful, selling more than 20 million records.
Now she is on stage again in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. A Billy Elliot for our gender-fluid times, the musical follows the fortunes of a Sheffield schoolboy who dreams of being a drag queen. Tozer plays his class teacher, Miss Hedge.
Like Jamie in Sheffield, Tozer says she was dreaming of bigger things when she was growing up in Dunstable, Bedfordshire. ‘I was doing a lot of dancing, I was in bands and acting at the local theatre after school.’
Tozer was 12 when she first tasted failure. ‘It was the first time I didn’t get an audition,’ she says. ‘And it broke my heart. That’s when my mum explained to me that I would always be too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too blonde or too dark at some point. Sometimes that role just wasn’t for me, but there is a job out there for everyone.’
Tozer is coy when asked if being in Steps has made her rich. ‘From that Nineties generation of pop groups, I think we did pretty well,’ she says. ‘From rumours I hear, we had a good deal.’
Were they really as clean cut as their image? ‘Oh God, no. We propped up the hotel bar wherever we went,’ Tozer says. ‘But there were a couple of years at the height of Steps’ success when I didn’t feel comfortable with the attention. I didn’t like going out on my own in public. People would manhandle and grab me.’
Faye Tozer with Layton Williams in Everybody’s Talking About Jamie
Steps broke up in 2001 when Watkins and Richards left to form a duo, but the group got back together in 2011 and have toured regularly since 2016. ‘We’ve been able to regroup, and we’re probably stronger than ever,’ she says.
Her Strictly fame has pushed the band’s profile, and it would have been pushed even further if, like Walsh, she’d been caught kissing her partner outside a pub. But Tozer gave a masterclass in how to come through Strictly with your marriage intact, despite the bump and occasional grind the show demands.
‘Strictly was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ she says. ‘And it’s true, you are in such close physical proximity all the time. But then it ends and you move on. You say goodbye.’
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