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Baby Ballroom
Spending £2k on dresses, travelling all over the country and giving up everything to make it big… inside the cut-throat world of junior ballroom dancing
THE shouts of encouragement almost drown out the deafening music. “Come on Rebecca,” one dad yells, as excited mums cheer and whistle their children on.
Welcome to the world of competitive junior ballroom dancing which makes Strictly Come Dancing seem like a pensioner’s tea dance.
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Parents from around the country - and even one dance school from Dubai - have congregated on a ballroom inside a Blackpool hotel for the Tenth Unity Dance Festival.
At 8.30am a queue for the breakfast buffet has kids in onesies and pyjamas, complete with immaculately coiffured hair, ready for food.
The children have already been up for hours getting ready and the last thing needed is beans down the front of a £2,000 ballgown.
Angela Meah, 48, travelled up from Birmingham with her son Jamie, the under-14 British champion.
Dance teacher Warren whips kids into shape on Baby Ballroom
Dreams of being a world champion
“I’m looking for first today… not that I am a pushy mum,” she laughs. “Okay I’ll be honest, I am a little bit pushy. But if he becomes world champion it will make all this worthwhile.”
Angela and husband Moh, 52, have devoted their lives to helping their 14-year-old son achieve his dream of becoming a world champion.
His dance partner Paris Morgan, 13, lives in Metrhyr Vale, South Wales, while they live in Birmingham.
They train two to three times a week.
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Long weekends are spent at each other’s houses and twice a week the Meahs drive all the way to Wales for a few hours of practice.
Then there is the expense. The tailor made suits, one for ballroom the other for Latin, cost £1,500 each.
The weekend in Blackpool will cost them £300 but an event at the same hotel in Easter will cost more than £1,000.
Angela says: “We don’t eat, we haven’t had a holiday in years, the house is falling apart.
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“We will have one day off from it this week but then it is back down to Wales. We have a place half way where we meet with Paris’ parents and swap children when she stays with us for the weekend or Jamie at theirs.
“We look like child traffickers when we exchange them!
“We go to Merthyr in the middle of the week and it is a four hour round trip. Some nights he doesn’t get in until midnight.
“But while he enjoys it we will invest time and money and effort into this to let him go for his dream of being a world champion.
The Strictly stars who danced as kids
Pro AJ Pritchard danced competitively since he was 12 and was National Youth Latin Champion three years running.
Fellow dancer Aljaž Skorjanec started dancing at the age of five, and spent the following 13 years competing.
Chloe Hewitt first got into dancing when she was seven, and has racked up a number of wins at youth championships.
Kevin Clifton is a former youth number one.
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Passion for dance
Jamie is a bright and very mature teenager. While others his age lie in bed till midday and are glued to their X Boxes, he is truly dedicated to dancing.
He is one of the stars of Channel 5’s Baby Ballroom and the last series revealed his passion for dancing to his school.
He says: “I was quite nervous thinking what people at school would say. But they were great and really supportive. I think Strictly has helped and made dancing more acceptable.
“I don’t mind all the work. I want to be a dancer when I am older…but I also want to be a biologist. Maybe a dancing biologist?”
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Inside the ballroom an array of cups adorn the stage all neatly paired up.
The largest are for the English open junior and senior winners.
At 10.30am the competition gets underway as ear splitting music come from the PA system.
There is barely time to pause for breath as the dancers elegantly rattle through the 70 heats and finals.
Parents stand on chairs and cheer.
Some give thumbs up signs others try to correct errors with one mum and dad desperately motioning to their child to keep his chin up.
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Complicated routines
After the dance some girls slump in their seat and bored siblings who aren’t competing are glued to games on their tablets.
Three judges haunt the side of the floor marking the competitors as they whisk through tangos, quick steps and waltzes. The shouting and whistling intensifies when a heat turns into a final.
The excitement is too much for one nine-year-old who bursts into tears when she isn't selected.
After the morning's ballroom it is a quick change into Latin costumes which are shorter for the girls and transparent Lycra tops with plunging necklines for boys.
Ballroom dancing has seen a boom thanks to the popularity of BBC One's Strictly and boys who now take it up are no longer jeered or bullied in the playground.
But there is still a shortage of boys so some of the categories see girls dancing together.
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An online match
Alicia Philips-Bullock and her triplet sister India have been dancing since they could walk. The 18-year-old pair already have a clutch of titles to their names but when it came to finding a suitable partner they had to take to the internet.
After seeing a video of Ukranian Kirill Dovzhik, Alicia flew to Kiev to see if they were a good match.
The then 18-year-old left his girlfriend, his university studies, job, family and friends for the chance to make it as a professional in Britain.
He now shares a room with Thor Jonsson, 23, who left his home in Iceland to partner India, in the family’s six bedroom house.
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Kirill, 21, has no regrets about leaving his life behind.
He says: “My dream is to become a professional dancer and a world champion. Britain offered me a lot of opportunities. I don’t regret what I have done.
“I was at university and I was serious about it but I gave up studying. I had a girlfriend of two years and I ended that. I had friends and family I left behind and I left my job.
“But it was worth it.”
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The pair crossed the line from professional to personal when they started dating. But they've since split up.
Alicia says: “We were together for about a year when we first got together. You spend a lot of time together and you don’t get a lot of time apart.
“When you are living together, working together then going out together it gets a bit much.
“But we are good friends now.”
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Julia Stockmier, 43, has flown in from Dubai for the competition with her two boys Max, 14, and 12-year-old Theo.
The full time mum said: “There is no ballroom dancing in Dubai because it is an Islamic country so we have to fly somewhere else for competitions.
"We can dance and train but we can’t compete so here we are in Blackpool. It can be very expensive.”
Arlo and Lola are two of the youngest child stars on the new series of Baby Ballroom
Bank worker Becky Ford, 40, from Great Barr, Birmingham, said her eight-year-old son Arlo loved competing.
“He dances all the time anyway,” she says. “We tried football and we tried boxing but he didn’t like those so a friend said why not try dancing and bring him along on a Sunday. We took him along and he took to it like a duck to water. He loved it.
“His friends love what he is doing. They all came to see him the other week.”
Arlo and his dance partner Lola Norton, six, stand calmly at the side of the dance floor as they wait their turn to compete.
Her mum Chell, 33, from Telford, Shropshire said they suffered from nerves before taking to the floor.
“They call it 'nervicited', they are nervous and excited,” she says.
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As the dancers pack up and prepare for a dinner, followed by a dance of course, the subject turns to Strictly.
“It’s just cabaret,” says one parent. “It is nothing like this, this is the real thing.”
Kirril, who used to watch the Ukranian version of the show back home, is also not impressed.
“I find it a little bit fake, he says. “It’s not my cup of tea.”
Baby Ballroom, 5STAR, Thursdays at 9pm from 10th May.