Red Moon
17-11-2007, 08:26 AM
The Strictly Come Dancing judges say she's 'as sexy as a coconut'. But to one man Kate Garraway is seduction on legsLove may be blind, but love coupled with an inability to tell your waltz from your cha-cha-cha is clearly blind, deaf and dumb.
Derek Draper - aka Mr Kate Garraway - is genuinely baffled.
His missus, the clunkiest dancer since Pinocchio? What can they mean? "I honestly don't see it," he says of his wife's lumbering round the Strictly Come Dancing dancefloor.
"I watch her every week and don't have a clue if the judges are going to award her two points or ten. I really know nothing about dance. To me, she looks brilliant out there.
"Last week, she did this spinning thing. She was crouching down, with one leg out, while her dance partner Anton du Beke spun her round and round. And she didn't fall over once. I thought: 'Wow, that was amazing!'
"And you know what? I reckon the public thinks that, too. I mean, does anyone really know the toes should be pointed during that move rather than straight, as the judges said they should be. I mean, the woman was swivelling on one leg without ending up in a heap on the floor. And smiling, too. Come on!"
Ah, bless. Every Saturday, as GMTV presenter Kate dons her sequins and steels herself for whatever insults the judges can hurl at her, Derek, her husband of two years, is in the audience, feeling decidedly nervous and knowing that at some point in the evening he will find himself saying:
"But darling, you were sexy to me."
Still, he is in good company. Previous weeks have found him swopping sob stories with fellow Strictly HABs (Husbands And Boyfriends) Billy Zane and Rod Stewart.
"It's a bit like fathers standing on the sidelines at sports day, getting more nervous as the evening goes on, but powerless to help. We all say we aren't in the least bit competitive, but, of course, we are."
Last week, there were tears before bedtime. Rod had to take a distraught Penny home after she was voted off.
But Kate was less than euphoric herself. Her glee at surviving for another week - a miracle, granted - was tempered by the judges' venom.
Arlene Phillips declared her salsa to be "as sexy as a coconut", which was a bit of a slap in the face when Kate had donned her fishnets specially.
Derek, who had spent all week reassuring his wife that she was sex on legs, was loyally outraged on her behalf.
"OK, maybe she struggles with ra-ra sexy, but she's good at girl-next-door sexy, and she's quite good at sultry sexy. I think you'll see that this week."
Somehow, Derek, we doubt it. But stranger things have happened, as this year's Strictly Come Dancing has proved.
The first shock was when sports presenter Gabby Logan - a woman who literally bent over backwards to prove her dancing prowess - was voted off.
Then off, too, tottered model Penny Lancaster, another leggy favourite.
Still in contention in the competition are former EastEnders actress Letitia Dean, who has been dubbed "the jiving satsuma", and Kate, a woman who jumped around with such inexpert enthusiasm during the first week's rehearsals that she pulled tendons in both feet.
"The first two weeks she danced in bandages," says Derek. "The viewers wouldn't have seen them. I think they dug out Nora Batty's old tights to cover them up."
Even when her injuries had healed and there was no longer an excuse for her lack of ability, the voters kept Kate in, excusing the fact she danced with all the grace of a baby elephant.
You may think besotted husband Derek is in no way qualified to ruminate on why she is still in the competition. But he knows a thing or two about the great British public. In his pre-Kate life, he was not only a political spin doctor, but one of the architects of New Labour.
His job was to predict, indeed anticipate, public opinion, and work out how it could be made compatible with the likes of Peter Mandelson.
It all ended in a nervous breakdown, leading to Derek spending a month in the Priory, before he retrained, astonishingly enough, as a psychotherapist. He now works in private practice.
Given his two areas of expertise, I expect him to scratch his chin for a bit before concluding that the Strictly Come Dancing voting proves that the British public - always woefully easily led and given to eccentric behaviour - clearly has mental health issues. But he comes to a more prosaic conclusion.
"I have to be careful what I say because I don't want to be unfair to my wife, but I think something quite remarkable is happening with the voting.
"Obviously Kate isn't the best dancer in the competition, but people want to tell her that they support her.
"I wonder if it's because they identify with her, in a way they can't with the likes of Kelly Brook and Alesha Dixon.
"Those girls are simply fantastic. They look great. Kelly is a model and Alesha - well, let's face it, she could be. And they are utterly brilliant dancers, too.
"But you can imagine women at home watching them and thinking: 'I could never be like that.' But with Kate, they see someone who is more like them, and they think: 'If I had the chance, maybe that could be me.'
"Quite simply, they see a little bit of themselves in her. Maybe when they vote for Kate, they are really voting for themselves. Is that the answer?"
Who knows? But it's as convincing an argument as any other.
When he traded in New Labour for something more meaningful, Derek Draper went to the U.S. to train as a psychotherapist, largely because no one there was likely to say "What - not that Derek Draper?" when he introduced himself.
But this is the modern age of communication and reputations travel far. One day, he turned up for a lecture and a fellow student told him she'd discovered the funniest thing.
"She said: 'I've Googled your name and guess what - there's a famous guy in England who has something to do with politics. He has the same name as you and he's a complete t***.'
"At first, I said, yes, I'd heard of him. Then I confessed it was actually me. She didn't believe me.
"She said: 'But he's written a book about Tony Blair. What on earth do you know about Tony Blair?'"
Such incredulity has stalked Draper ever since. When it emerged that he and Kate, the darling of breakfast TV, were an item, the political and media worlds united in shock.
"Derek bloody Draper! If I'd known the bar was set so low, I'd have had a go myself," was Piers Morgan's infamous reaction.
At their wedding, Derek's family embraced the parents of fragrant Kate with the comment - in his words - "I can't believe your daughter's married our fat ********* Derek."
It was a meeting of opposites. Kate was a Home Counties girl, middle class to the core, who had started her career with Radio Oxford.
He was the brash Northerner who had invented champagne socialism, but who fell from grace spectacularly after boasting of his access to Government ministers.
His evangelical enthusiasm about therapy came about only because he reached rock bottom himself.
It was the "new" Derek who was introduced to Kate by GMTV's political correspondent, Gloria de Piero. He reckons the "old" Derek - cocky, loud and obnoxious in the extreme - wouldn't have stood a chance.
"I reckon she would have been intrigued by me, maybe enough to go on a date or two. But marriage? No. I was all over the place in those days, living a hedonistic life. She wouldn't have touched me with a bargepole, and rightly so."
Their wedding spread itself over 22 pages of a feel-good magazine, which made Derek wonder if he had really stopped taking drugs.
What's interesting is that neither set of friends - Kate's drawn from the nicey-nice world of daytime TV; Derek's from the dark corridors of Westminster - had the faintest idea who the other was.
"When my friends asked who she was and I said 'She works for GMTV', they looked blank. But if I'd said she was the third presenter on Newsnight, they would have known exactly who she was.
"Even until quite recently, they would phone me and say, in complete bewilderment: 'Kate is on the cover of TV Times - why?' I'd say: 'Because she is a TV presenter.' It would never occur to them to watch GMTV."
Funnily enough, all that has changed. If Strictly Come Dancing has done nothing else, it has united the polar opposites.
"It really does cross boundaries. My friends are phoning up saying they've been following Kate every Saturday, and isn't it exciting. I've heard that Gordon Brown is a big fan of the programme.
"All my old cronies who were researchers at the same time as me are now in the Cabinet. They are saying: 'Isn't she brave, your wife!'
"Kate's GMTV fans watch it. Even my clients say: 'I saw your wife on the TV at the weekend.' It's a bit mad, but nice with it. For the first time, we're all in this together."
Derek is inordinately proud of his wife. He won't exactly say that when they were introduced he suspected she would be a pretty airhead, but that seems to be the gist of it. He was pleasantly surprised when she turned out to be, well, probably the most normal person he'd ever come across.
"There are people who are attracted to those sorts of jobs because of the fame they bring with them - and others for whom fame is just the by-product. Let's just say I didn't know which type she would be, and was relieved when it was the latter."
She is no political animal, though. "Do you know I still can't tell you how Kate would vote if there was an election tomorrow," he says.
I ask if he knows how she voted in the last election. He flounders.
"Right, last election . . . OK . . . so, 2005. When were we married? Oh God. Now let's see . . . Oh dear, I'm hopeless with dates."
Anyway, the upshot seems to be that he hasn't a clue.
He says: "Kate's not that political, you see. I don't mean she isn't interested in politics because she is involved in the issues - such as care of the elderly, she's passionate about that - but she isn't interested in policy.
"She has to read the newspapers for her work, yes, but if you offered her Grazia or the Guardian, she'd take Grazia every time."
Still, woe betide anyone who tries to say this makes Kate thick. Even before they married, Derek clearly had a healthy respect for the oftderided daytime TV presenters.
"It's a myth that politicians are terrified of being grilled by Jeremy Paxman or Jon Snow. They aren't, because those are exactly the sort of people they are used to facing.
"It's the Kates and Fionas on programmes such as GMTV who really scare them, because they pose the sort of questions ordinary people would ask."
Anyway, for the record, Kate seems to be as nice at home as she is on the GMTV sofa.
It seems she doesn't come home from her stint on Strictly Come Dancing weeping and wailing that Kelly Brook has longer legs and why can't her bum be more like Penny Lancaster's.
"She really doesn't," says Derek. "She will say: 'Yes, I am upset.' We'll have a chat about what went wrong. But she has a healthy way of dealing with stuff like that.
"I have been involved with some incredibly high maintenance women in the past, and I see an awful lot of them in my work, so I'm well placed to say that I think Kate is about the least high maintenance woman I know - in fact, that I have ever met. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I think she is the perfect wife.
"I have a tendency to get issues out of proportion and to moan about things, but in our house Kate is always the one defusing the situation. She really does have a sunny disposition."
Well, tonight we'll see just how that disposition bears up to another mauling by the Strictly Come Dancing judges.
Derek admits he will be feeling anything but sunny by the time the band strikes up.
"The protective bit of me feels quite sick, and I want to rush out there and do it for her," he says.
That would probably be the last thing Kate needs. Derek once had a dance lesson himself, courtesy of Strictly Come Dancing's very own professional Brendan Cole. He wanted to be able to lead Kate around the dancefloor on their wedding day without trampling on her dress. Did he succeed?
"Er, no. Brendan said I was the worst dancer he'd ever come across."
Worse, even, than his lovely wife? "Oh in a different league completely," he says. "The judges wouldn't even be able to find the words for me."
Source: Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=494582&in_page_id=1773)
Derek Draper - aka Mr Kate Garraway - is genuinely baffled.
His missus, the clunkiest dancer since Pinocchio? What can they mean? "I honestly don't see it," he says of his wife's lumbering round the Strictly Come Dancing dancefloor.
"I watch her every week and don't have a clue if the judges are going to award her two points or ten. I really know nothing about dance. To me, she looks brilliant out there.
"Last week, she did this spinning thing. She was crouching down, with one leg out, while her dance partner Anton du Beke spun her round and round. And she didn't fall over once. I thought: 'Wow, that was amazing!'
"And you know what? I reckon the public thinks that, too. I mean, does anyone really know the toes should be pointed during that move rather than straight, as the judges said they should be. I mean, the woman was swivelling on one leg without ending up in a heap on the floor. And smiling, too. Come on!"
Ah, bless. Every Saturday, as GMTV presenter Kate dons her sequins and steels herself for whatever insults the judges can hurl at her, Derek, her husband of two years, is in the audience, feeling decidedly nervous and knowing that at some point in the evening he will find himself saying:
"But darling, you were sexy to me."
Still, he is in good company. Previous weeks have found him swopping sob stories with fellow Strictly HABs (Husbands And Boyfriends) Billy Zane and Rod Stewart.
"It's a bit like fathers standing on the sidelines at sports day, getting more nervous as the evening goes on, but powerless to help. We all say we aren't in the least bit competitive, but, of course, we are."
Last week, there were tears before bedtime. Rod had to take a distraught Penny home after she was voted off.
But Kate was less than euphoric herself. Her glee at surviving for another week - a miracle, granted - was tempered by the judges' venom.
Arlene Phillips declared her salsa to be "as sexy as a coconut", which was a bit of a slap in the face when Kate had donned her fishnets specially.
Derek, who had spent all week reassuring his wife that she was sex on legs, was loyally outraged on her behalf.
"OK, maybe she struggles with ra-ra sexy, but she's good at girl-next-door sexy, and she's quite good at sultry sexy. I think you'll see that this week."
Somehow, Derek, we doubt it. But stranger things have happened, as this year's Strictly Come Dancing has proved.
The first shock was when sports presenter Gabby Logan - a woman who literally bent over backwards to prove her dancing prowess - was voted off.
Then off, too, tottered model Penny Lancaster, another leggy favourite.
Still in contention in the competition are former EastEnders actress Letitia Dean, who has been dubbed "the jiving satsuma", and Kate, a woman who jumped around with such inexpert enthusiasm during the first week's rehearsals that she pulled tendons in both feet.
"The first two weeks she danced in bandages," says Derek. "The viewers wouldn't have seen them. I think they dug out Nora Batty's old tights to cover them up."
Even when her injuries had healed and there was no longer an excuse for her lack of ability, the voters kept Kate in, excusing the fact she danced with all the grace of a baby elephant.
You may think besotted husband Derek is in no way qualified to ruminate on why she is still in the competition. But he knows a thing or two about the great British public. In his pre-Kate life, he was not only a political spin doctor, but one of the architects of New Labour.
His job was to predict, indeed anticipate, public opinion, and work out how it could be made compatible with the likes of Peter Mandelson.
It all ended in a nervous breakdown, leading to Derek spending a month in the Priory, before he retrained, astonishingly enough, as a psychotherapist. He now works in private practice.
Given his two areas of expertise, I expect him to scratch his chin for a bit before concluding that the Strictly Come Dancing voting proves that the British public - always woefully easily led and given to eccentric behaviour - clearly has mental health issues. But he comes to a more prosaic conclusion.
"I have to be careful what I say because I don't want to be unfair to my wife, but I think something quite remarkable is happening with the voting.
"Obviously Kate isn't the best dancer in the competition, but people want to tell her that they support her.
"I wonder if it's because they identify with her, in a way they can't with the likes of Kelly Brook and Alesha Dixon.
"Those girls are simply fantastic. They look great. Kelly is a model and Alesha - well, let's face it, she could be. And they are utterly brilliant dancers, too.
"But you can imagine women at home watching them and thinking: 'I could never be like that.' But with Kate, they see someone who is more like them, and they think: 'If I had the chance, maybe that could be me.'
"Quite simply, they see a little bit of themselves in her. Maybe when they vote for Kate, they are really voting for themselves. Is that the answer?"
Who knows? But it's as convincing an argument as any other.
When he traded in New Labour for something more meaningful, Derek Draper went to the U.S. to train as a psychotherapist, largely because no one there was likely to say "What - not that Derek Draper?" when he introduced himself.
But this is the modern age of communication and reputations travel far. One day, he turned up for a lecture and a fellow student told him she'd discovered the funniest thing.
"She said: 'I've Googled your name and guess what - there's a famous guy in England who has something to do with politics. He has the same name as you and he's a complete t***.'
"At first, I said, yes, I'd heard of him. Then I confessed it was actually me. She didn't believe me.
"She said: 'But he's written a book about Tony Blair. What on earth do you know about Tony Blair?'"
Such incredulity has stalked Draper ever since. When it emerged that he and Kate, the darling of breakfast TV, were an item, the political and media worlds united in shock.
"Derek bloody Draper! If I'd known the bar was set so low, I'd have had a go myself," was Piers Morgan's infamous reaction.
At their wedding, Derek's family embraced the parents of fragrant Kate with the comment - in his words - "I can't believe your daughter's married our fat ********* Derek."
It was a meeting of opposites. Kate was a Home Counties girl, middle class to the core, who had started her career with Radio Oxford.
He was the brash Northerner who had invented champagne socialism, but who fell from grace spectacularly after boasting of his access to Government ministers.
His evangelical enthusiasm about therapy came about only because he reached rock bottom himself.
It was the "new" Derek who was introduced to Kate by GMTV's political correspondent, Gloria de Piero. He reckons the "old" Derek - cocky, loud and obnoxious in the extreme - wouldn't have stood a chance.
"I reckon she would have been intrigued by me, maybe enough to go on a date or two. But marriage? No. I was all over the place in those days, living a hedonistic life. She wouldn't have touched me with a bargepole, and rightly so."
Their wedding spread itself over 22 pages of a feel-good magazine, which made Derek wonder if he had really stopped taking drugs.
What's interesting is that neither set of friends - Kate's drawn from the nicey-nice world of daytime TV; Derek's from the dark corridors of Westminster - had the faintest idea who the other was.
"When my friends asked who she was and I said 'She works for GMTV', they looked blank. But if I'd said she was the third presenter on Newsnight, they would have known exactly who she was.
"Even until quite recently, they would phone me and say, in complete bewilderment: 'Kate is on the cover of TV Times - why?' I'd say: 'Because she is a TV presenter.' It would never occur to them to watch GMTV."
Funnily enough, all that has changed. If Strictly Come Dancing has done nothing else, it has united the polar opposites.
"It really does cross boundaries. My friends are phoning up saying they've been following Kate every Saturday, and isn't it exciting. I've heard that Gordon Brown is a big fan of the programme.
"All my old cronies who were researchers at the same time as me are now in the Cabinet. They are saying: 'Isn't she brave, your wife!'
"Kate's GMTV fans watch it. Even my clients say: 'I saw your wife on the TV at the weekend.' It's a bit mad, but nice with it. For the first time, we're all in this together."
Derek is inordinately proud of his wife. He won't exactly say that when they were introduced he suspected she would be a pretty airhead, but that seems to be the gist of it. He was pleasantly surprised when she turned out to be, well, probably the most normal person he'd ever come across.
"There are people who are attracted to those sorts of jobs because of the fame they bring with them - and others for whom fame is just the by-product. Let's just say I didn't know which type she would be, and was relieved when it was the latter."
She is no political animal, though. "Do you know I still can't tell you how Kate would vote if there was an election tomorrow," he says.
I ask if he knows how she voted in the last election. He flounders.
"Right, last election . . . OK . . . so, 2005. When were we married? Oh God. Now let's see . . . Oh dear, I'm hopeless with dates."
Anyway, the upshot seems to be that he hasn't a clue.
He says: "Kate's not that political, you see. I don't mean she isn't interested in politics because she is involved in the issues - such as care of the elderly, she's passionate about that - but she isn't interested in policy.
"She has to read the newspapers for her work, yes, but if you offered her Grazia or the Guardian, she'd take Grazia every time."
Still, woe betide anyone who tries to say this makes Kate thick. Even before they married, Derek clearly had a healthy respect for the oftderided daytime TV presenters.
"It's a myth that politicians are terrified of being grilled by Jeremy Paxman or Jon Snow. They aren't, because those are exactly the sort of people they are used to facing.
"It's the Kates and Fionas on programmes such as GMTV who really scare them, because they pose the sort of questions ordinary people would ask."
Anyway, for the record, Kate seems to be as nice at home as she is on the GMTV sofa.
It seems she doesn't come home from her stint on Strictly Come Dancing weeping and wailing that Kelly Brook has longer legs and why can't her bum be more like Penny Lancaster's.
"She really doesn't," says Derek. "She will say: 'Yes, I am upset.' We'll have a chat about what went wrong. But she has a healthy way of dealing with stuff like that.
"I have been involved with some incredibly high maintenance women in the past, and I see an awful lot of them in my work, so I'm well placed to say that I think Kate is about the least high maintenance woman I know - in fact, that I have ever met. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I think she is the perfect wife.
"I have a tendency to get issues out of proportion and to moan about things, but in our house Kate is always the one defusing the situation. She really does have a sunny disposition."
Well, tonight we'll see just how that disposition bears up to another mauling by the Strictly Come Dancing judges.
Derek admits he will be feeling anything but sunny by the time the band strikes up.
"The protective bit of me feels quite sick, and I want to rush out there and do it for her," he says.
That would probably be the last thing Kate needs. Derek once had a dance lesson himself, courtesy of Strictly Come Dancing's very own professional Brendan Cole. He wanted to be able to lead Kate around the dancefloor on their wedding day without trampling on her dress. Did he succeed?
"Er, no. Brendan said I was the worst dancer he'd ever come across."
Worse, even, than his lovely wife? "Oh in a different league completely," he says. "The judges wouldn't even be able to find the words for me."
Source: Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=494582&in_page_id=1773)