Strictly Come Dancing star Robert Webb reveals secret health battle that nearly cost him his life
FOR the past two weeks comic Robert Webb has entertained audiences with his energetic dances on Strictly – but last year he could barely walk after having emergency surgery to save his life.
Robert, 49, best known for co-starring with David Mitchell in cult sitcom Peep Show, learned he had a congenital heart defect made worse by a ten-year battle with the bottle.
Now he sees his appearance on the BBC1 dance contest as the latest stage in a miracle road to recovery.
He said: “When I first came out of hospital I could not walk to the end of the street without help. I couldn’t even lift a kettle for four weeks.
“So gradually you build up again until you are doing longer and longer walks. Then seven months later the walks turn into runs — and then you become a dancer.
“This was not the first time they asked, and I knew there would be a collision between me and Strictly very likely to happen in the future.
“But it goes back to the heart surgery — now I think I have got something to offer this show.”
Just 18 months ago Robert — also a regular comedy panellist on Have I Got News for You, Never Mind The Buzzcocks and QI — literally did not have the heart to sign up for Strictly, despite being a fan for years.
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He had been feeling rough for some time but when he went for check-up just before lockdown began in March last year he had no idea he was at death’s door.
Speaking at Oxfordshire’s Henley Literary Festival to promote his debut novel, time travel tragi-comedy Come Again, he said: “I just thought: ‘This is my lifestyle and this is what it feels like to be 47.’
“But it’s a birth defect — one of the valves in my heart had prolapsed instead of opening and shutting nicely. It had almost doubled in size, it was this really weird shape and it was doing all this just to keep the show on the road.
“My heart thought that I was running up a hill when I was asleep, and I had not noticed. I thought: ‘Well, I am tired, as I treat my body like a skip.’
“I saw a cardiologist and they said I had ‘severe regurgitation’ — that the blood that should have been pushed around my body was flowing back-wards into a different chamber, causing all sorts of trouble.”
The problem was not as terrifying as the solution — open-heart surgery — but married dad-of-two Robert was told by the experts he had little choice but to go into theatre.
Lincolnshire-born Robert, who has been married to fellow comic Abigail Burdess for 15 years, said: “The cardiologist told me: ‘I am not saying you are going to have a heart attack in the next fortnight but if we don’t fix it in the next two to three months this heart will fail.’
So that got my attention. The worst bit was when I was having the ultrasound (scan) for the heart, I was bare-chested and facing the wall and someone had this thing on my back.
“You could hear these two technicians go: ‘Oh yeah, that’s severe. We should get him back.’ And you are like: ‘Am I going to see Christmas?’”
After open-heart surgery last year, Cambridge University English grad-uate Robert decided to change his lifestyle — and top of his hit list was to ditch the booze.
He said he had been “slow-killing” himself with alcohol, increasing the amount he was consuming to the point where he believed he had become addicted.
But his near-death experience, and being taken into hospital, gave him the shock he needed. He said: “It does give you a different per-spective, because I had been trying to give up drinking and smoking for the last five, six or ten years and found it really difficult.
'WAS NOT LIVING WELL'
“I was not living well when I wrote my novel, Come Again. I was drink-ing a lot and I made it a lot harder than it needed to be.
“Addiction specialists call it ‘permission beliefs’ and it is those things that give you permission to start drinking at 8am — like: ‘I am feeling very blocked at the moment.’
“It is not as though I became angry, it is just that drunks are tired all the time. I saw a few therapists and I tried all kinds of things. I tried every-thing but that week in hospital was the gap in the domino topple I needed. That circuit breaker.
“You come out with a whole different attitude towards your internal organs, like: ‘Yeah, these are my guys. My body has been through a really traumatic thing. All I want to do is do right by it. I want to look after it.’
“So I started walking. Then I became a runner and some really cool people in cardio rehab looked after me, so twice a week via Zoom during Covid I would do weights and training. Before Strictly, I was fitter than I had been for the whole of the rest of my life.”
But he said nothing could have quite prepared him for the challenge of Strictly, where Aussie pro partner Dianne Buswell, 32, puts him through his paces.
PUT THROUGH PACES
He said: “We do 8am till 6pm training — It is a lot. I was not out of shape but I have lost weight since starting it. When jumping up and down for ten hours a day it is going to have an effect.
“So what is Strictly like? When it is good it is really good. The best part is the performance on a Saturday night — like getting through it and it is not a disaster.
“I have got through two dances and that is a big rush. Dianne is terrific. But it is a lot of hard work. Today there was a bit where I could not get it at all and I was almost weeping as it is so intense.
“It is like: ‘I have got to do this on Saturday. I am never going to do this bit.’ A lot of the time I am not wired up right, as my brain refuses to put this leg over this leg.
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“Also, the difference with this job is that it sort of does not know it is just a job. It thinks it is a cult or it is something bigger. And I have never been in a show that is an actual institution.”
- Strictly Come Dancing continues on BBC1 tomorrow at 6.45pm.
