BBC Strictly Come Dancing star Chris McCausland's condition and 'dare' that changed his life forever

Chris McCausland will don his dancing shoes for the new season of Strictly Come Dancing. The Scouse comedian has been paired up with professional dancer Dianne Buswell, who came second in last year's series alongside EastEnders star Bobby Brazier.

Chris will make history on the BBC programme as he will be the show's first-ever blind contestant. However, the 47-year-old has insisted on receiving no extra help with his training. He told our sister site, Mirror Online: "In my opinion, the point of it is for my partner to learn how to teach me and me to learn a dance from her and that’s for us to figure it out together. We’ll make mistakes and we’ll have a laugh along the way and that’ll make for better VTs in the week.

"So they did offer it as a thing but we decided not to do it. We want to make mistakes along the way and not go into it with this kind of code that we’ve been taught, do you know what I mean? I’m all up for blundering my way through it and having some fun along the way."

Chris hails from West Derby and has been a stand-up comic since 2003. He was born with a genetic condition called retinitis pigmentosa (RP) and lost his sight at age 22. Chris admitted it was a scary and embarrassing time when he started to lose his eyesight.

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He told Mirror Online: "I found myself in difficult situations because I was reluctant to ask for help. I knew I would never be on a level playing field with everyone else. My eyesight deteriorated significantly while I was at university, and the technology available at that time wasn’t advanced enough, so I had to abandon my career path in web development."

The condition sparked Chris to drastically change careers as he had a go at stand-up as a "dare". Speaking to the ECHO in 2016, he said: "When I finished uni I focused on designing websites, but then my eyesight started deteriorating and I had enough.

"I knocked it on the head and tried to find something else to do. I was unemployed for maybe a year and a half and in the end I got a job doing business sales. It was really, really boring stuff - just filling the time until I figured out what I properly wanted to do.

"Then, when I was 26, I got shingles and was signed off from work for two weeks. I was bored out of my head and as a dare from myself I decided to have a go at stand-up.”

Speaking about his first gig he said: “I don’t think it could have been scarier. I didn’t eat a thing all day and just paced around my flat. I’d never been a public speaker, I have no drama experience or anything.

"It was in this venue in Balham, south London. I was quite lucky because it went well - in fact the first ten or so gigs I did went well. Then after that, I played some gigs which were so bad that if they’d been my first gig I would have never done stand-up again. Those first few gigs really gave me the stand-up bug and I’ve been doing it ever since."

Chris' career has continued to go from strength to strength as he now fronts his own Saturday morning chat show and has appeared on a number of TV shows. He said none of this would have been possible if he hadn't dared himself to get up on stage.

He told the ECHO: "The thing with comedy though is that once you start doing it it opens a lot of doors to other things. Last year I acted in a BBC1 Jimmy McGovern drama called ‘Moving On’, set in Liverpool.

"I’d never done straight acting before but I enjoyed doing it. It’s good to do something as part of a team as stand-up’s quite solitary. I used a computer to learn my lines. Everything talks these days - they just email me stuff and I listen to it. It’s great."

Strictly Come Dancing's launch episode gets underway at 7.20pm on BBC One on Saturday, September 14.

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