Interview'Winning Strictly was the first time I'd cried since Barcelona 4-0!'

“Strictly was very emotional,” reflects Chris as he thinks about becoming the first blind person to compete in, and win, the BBC show, in December 2024.

“My daughter said to me, ‘I’ve never seen you cry before.’ And I said, ‘Yeah but you didn’t see me when Liverpool beat Barcelona 4-0!’ That was the last time I cried before Strictly. I was in bits.”

Born and raised in West Derby, 47-year-old Chris first came to many people’s attention when he starred in Jimmy McGovern’s Moving On in 2014, having long established himself as a comedian.

Appearances on multiple shows, including Would I Lie To You, Have I Got News For You, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and Richard Osman’s House Of Games, followed, but it is for winning the 22nd series of Strictly that he is perhaps now most well-known, with his love of LFC playing a significant part in his success after he and partner Dianne Buswell won the final dancing to You’ll Never Walk Alone.

“Obviously a lot of people saw me on Strictly and myself and Dianne first danced to You’ll Never Walk Alone in episode five,” he says. “The first episode of Strictly was the most fear I’ve ever had before doing anything. We danced to The Beatles, with the Cavern Club as the setting on the stage, and did a cha-cha-cha, but I was terrified.

“It was the first time I’d done it, it was on live TV, there was no good edit and it could have been a catastrophe. Week after week, I’d improve with my nerves but in week five, when we did You’ll Never Walk Alone, I had a whole new level of nerves because of the weight of pressure.

“I didn’t want to take it on and hear everybody in Liverpool going, ‘That was bad.’ I wanted to do a good job because I was representing the city by putting it on TV every week and dancing to a song that means a lot to a lot of people.

“So I was really nervous doing it, but Dianne did such a good job choreographing it. She had the idea to leave me at one point and then I’d walk through the middle of the foam and we’d collide in a spin. At first I was like, ‘I think it’s a bit on the nose’, but she said, ‘Trust me’ and as we collided into the spin in rehearsal I could feel the emotion. I thought, ‘She’s bang on the money here, this feels emotional.’”

It went so well that when the pair wowed the judges and viewers to reach the final, they waltzed to the Anfield anthem again.

“The relief I felt to do a good job on it made me feel so proud and the reaction was unbelievable,” he says. “When you get messages from Everton and Man United fans saying kind things about You’ll Never Walk Alone, what more can you do?

“So we did it again in the final and got a perfect score, Dianne’s first in eight years, and we couldn’t have done it better. Tommy [Blaize] sang it and said he couldn’t look up as he’d start crying so just stared down at his music.

“Afterwards I got a lovely email from Gerry Marsden’s daughter to say what it would have meant to Gerry to see how we performed it in the final.”

Chris is a lifelong Liverpool FC supporter, but coming from this city things could have been very different and maybe Dianne would have had to choreograph a dance to Z-Cars had his family been Evertonians.

“I landed on my feet as a Red,” he laughs. “My best mate is a Blue so it’s luck of the draw in this city!”

Chris spoke to the LFC matchday programme to raise awareness of Unite For Access, an annual campaign celebrating inclusion and accessibility at sports venues. Despite his sight declining as he grew up, he’d already caught the football bug and adapted to find different ways of following the Reds.

• Find out more about Unite For Access here

“I was slowly going blind since I was born due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa and lost my sight completely aged 22, so I used to listen to the radio a lot for football,” he explains.

“My job now is quite antisocial in terms of working evenings and weekends and I spend a lot of time in the car. The radio is my way of consuming football, but if I’m honest, whenever possible I just put Steve Hunter from LFCTV on.

“We were doing a dress rehearsal for Strictly one Saturday afternoon and in the dress rehearsal you run through the whole show. I had to stand there and pretend to watch every other dance in the actual show, but Liverpool were playing that afternoon so when I’d done my bit I sat in the corner with my headphones on and listened to Steve’s commentary.

“When he gave me a shoutout in the commentary – ‘a big shoutout to one of our own, Chris McCausland, who is doing well on Strictly’ – I nearly fell down the stairs! If you’re reading, Steve, I appreciate it and it made me feel like a million dollars.

“I love a bit of biased commentary and Aldo [John Aldridge] screaming when we score, but a good commentator is very important when you’re blind. That’s why following Liverpool is better on the radio for me than the telly as the TV commentators don’t tend to bring anything to life like Steve and radio commentators do.”

Accessibility at football stadiums for everyone is also something Chris is passionate about and when attending matches at Anfield he has listened to the audio commentary provided for partially sighted and blind fans.

It isn’t just a case of providing commentary, though, it’s ensuring it can be heard as Anfield isn’t the quietest of places on a matchday.

“At stadiums, one of the real basic parts of accessibility is the choice of using your own earphones to listen to the audio commentary via a box rather than being provided with a big headset that makes you look like a 1960s radio DJ,” he says. “Thankfully it’s a facility Liverpool offer and credit to the club for that.

“I’ve joked about this in the past, but when you do get the commentary in the ground it gets so loud around you at Anfield that you only really hear the boring bits. If you can plug your own earphones in that go right inside your ears it gives you more volume, so if Mo Salah is running down the wing and the crowd gets loud you still know what’s going on. Which is usually a goal or assist with Mo!”

As he mentioned, the unsociable hours that he works and amount of travelling involved means that Chris can’t be an Anfield regular, but nor can he just switch the telly on and watch the Reds.

When you are reliant on commentators describing the action to paint pictures in your head you need them to be as descriptive as possible and Chris believes this is an area that TV companies can improve on to make football more accessible to those who can’t see it.

“I’ve been working with Sky and Lee Mack on something this year and I’ve been trying to sell the idea to them of offering a second commentary stream for fans like myself,” he explains.

“Football is the biggest sport in the country and Sky Sports is the biggest football broadcaster and I think accessibility is often better when it is mainstream that serves everybody.

“For instance, audio descriptions on TV only serve blind and partly-sighted people. It’s a specialist service, but if you think back to the 1980s everybody in Liverpool put the radio on and turned the telly down because people preferred the energy of the radio commentary.

“It was a choice people made, but when we went digital everything went out of sync and you can’t really do that anymore. So I think if someone like Sky offered standard TV commentary and, if you pressed the red button, also a Sky radio commentary it would be a mainstream feature that makes football more accessible.

“At the moment there is no point in me watching football on TV because of the commentary and the unfortunate thing about that is football is social and it removes the social aspect of it.

“I either watch Liverpool with my mates or my daughter on TV and don’t know what’s going on, or I put it on the radio and I do. So for me there is a lot that can be done to make football more accessible and inclusive on the telly.”

• Read the full interview with Chris in the matchday programme – which is available online here.