Anton Du Beke

Sevenoaks, then fourteen years of competition

He was born Anthony Paul Beke on 20 July 1966 in Tonbridge, Kent, to a Hungarian father, Antal Xavier Beke, and a Spanish mother, Ascensión Lema. He came to dancing late by competitive standards — at fourteen, at the Holton School of Dancing in Sevenoaks — and left school at sixteen to chase it, taking whatever work paid the bills through the 1980s and 1990s. That stretch of odd jobs is the spine of the stage show he is touring this autumn, which he bills as the music, memories and moments that made him.

From 1997 his regular professional partner was the New Zealand-born Erin Boag. The pair won the New Zealand championships in 1998 and 1999 and reached the British National finals in 2002, 2003 and 2004. By the time the BBC was casting a new Saturday-night ballroom format in 2004, they were ranked fourteenth in the world among professional couples — competitive credentials rather than television ones, which is exactly what the show was hiring for.

Every series since the first one

He danced in series one in 2004 with the soprano Lesley Garrett and finished third, and he has appeared in every series since. The partnerships that defined him publicly were rarely the ones built for the trophy. Ann Widdecombe in series eight, in 2010, lasted to sixth place on a formula of hoists, props and visible comic suffering, and the run turned him into the professional who could carry a celebrity with no dance background through ten weeks of prime time without the whole thing collapsing.

The scoring caught up with him late. In series seventeen, in 2019, he reached the final with the actor Emma Barton and took his first-ever tens — for an American Smooth, fifteen years into the job. It is the kind of detail that explains why the judging chair, when it came, read as a promotion rather than a retirement.

The chair, the novels and the fox

On 24 June 2021 the BBC confirmed him as a permanent judge from series nineteen, in the seat Bruno Tonioli had held since 2004. Five years on, the arrangement has settled: series twenty-four launched on 19 September 2026 with Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse, Shirley Ballas and Du Beke all returning to the panel, and with the biggest change happening in front of it — Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe presenting, the first time the show has run with three regular hosts rather than two.

Away from the panel he has built a second career as a novelist. The Buckingham Hotel series began in 2018 with One Enchanted Evening and ran to eight books; the eighth, The Winter Ball, arrived in October 2025. They are period romances set around a London hotel ballroom, which is to say he writes what he knows. He also released an album of standards, From the Top, in November 2017, and presented the BBC physical-comedy format Hole in the Wall across 2008 and 2009.

In January 2026 he turned up on ITV in a costume. He competed in series seven of The Masked Singer as Arctic Fox and was unmasked on 24 January, to visible surprise from a panel of Davina McCall, Mo Gilligan, Maya Jama and Jonathan Ross. For a judge whose television persona is built on politeness and timing, it was a useful reminder that the singing is not a joke.

The variety show he built on the side

The live work has evolved steadily away from the ballroom-exhibition format of the early Anton and Erin tours. Showman: An Evening With Anton Du Beke went out in autumn 2024 with the vocalist Lance Ellington and a company of dancers, and through 2025 the same machinery toured as Anton Du Beke at the Musicals — a two-act variety bill of show tunes, ballroom numbers and patter rather than a dance recital.

Reviewing the Southend-on-Sea date at the Cliffs Pavilion on 3 November 2025 for Seen and Heard International, Jim Pritchard described an old-fashioned variety evening in the tradition of a Palladium cabaret residency, with Du Beke working as a triple threat across singing, dancing and comic repartee. On that night the company was Ellington on vocals, the singer-dancers Lucy Nolan and Lowri Beth Evans, six more dancers and a seven-piece band under the musical director Clive Dunstall at the piano, with numbers drawn from My Fair Lady, Annie Get Your Gun, Moulin Rouge and Cabaret. Pritchard noted that Du Beke repeatedly stepped back into the ensemble instead of holding the centre, and that the audience stood for both the opening and closing numbers.

An earlier review of the same tour, published on 20 March 2025, gave it five stars and filled in the staging: a raised platform for the band, a dressing-room set dressed with minimal changes, choreography by Bill Deamer covering tango, tap, ballroom and cabaret, songs from Wicked, Dreamgirls, The Sound of Music and Hairspray, an improvised karaoke segment pulled out of the audience, and — the reviewer's phrase — chatter kept to a minimum between numbers.

Autumn 2026: a book, six nights, then eight more

The memoir is the news. Steps in Time: The Music, Memories and Moments that Made Me, his first full autobiography, publishes on 5 November 2026, and he is touring ahead of it from 26 October: New Theatre Cardiff, then G Live Guildford on 27 October, the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne on 28 October, New Century Hall in Manchester on 1 November, York Barbican on 2 November and the Bath Forum on 3 November. It is a talking show — childhood in the 1970s, the working years, two decades on Strictly — with a meet-and-greet ticket tier that includes a signed copy. York has it down for a 6.30pm door with the building clearing by 11pm; no running time has been published.

Then the December show, which is the one with eight dates on sale. Anton At Christmas was announced at the start of September 2026 and went on sale at 11am on Friday 4 September, presented by Phil McIntyre Live. It runs Watford Colosseum on 10 December, New Theatre Oxford on the 11th, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on the 13th, the Lyceum Theatre in London on the 14th, the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton on the 16th, Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall on the 20th, Bournemouth International Centre on the 21st and the Brighton Centre on the 22nd. Ellington returns on vocals with the live band and a troupe of professional dancers.

Du Beke's own line on it was that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year and that he could not wait to put the dancing shoes back on for it, which is roughly the register of the whole enterprise. He has nine-year-old twins at home in Burnham, Buckinghamshire, and the December run is deliberately short — two weeks, eight rooms, straight into the holiday.