Love Island star Tasha Ghouri expressed how she would have liked to have seen Strictly Come Dancing winner Chris McCausland on tour as the show kicks off this week.
The tour begins in Birmingham on Friday with actress Sarah Hadland, Ghouri, JLS singer JB Gill, EastEnders actor Jamie Borthwick and opera signer Wynne Evans, The X Factor winner Shayne Ward and Gladiators star Montell Douglas all confirmed in the line-up.
McCausland, who is currently on tour with his comedy show Yonks! in the UK, became the first blind person to win the popular BBC One competition series last year.
Ghouri told the PA news agency that McCausland’s partnership with Australian dancer Dianne Buswell was so “incredible” and “inspiring”, and she felt “so lucky to be part of that this year”.
She added: “It’s a shame that he can’t be here, but he’s here with us in our hearts, he really is, truly a special guy.”
The dancer and model, who was the second deaf contestant on the show and continues to be partnered with Aljaz Skorjanec for the tour, will face the other celebrities as the audiences decides who wins the coveted glitterball trophy at the end of each stop.
Opera singer Evans, and his professional partner Katya Jones – who were the eighth couple to depart last year, joked about McCausland backing them.
Evans, known for the Go.Compare insurance advertisements, said: “It’s so nice to be back and all the way through, and when we got knocked out in Blackpool, having the tour to look forward to was fantastic.”
“It kept us going,” Jones said as Evans fired back saying you are “used to it” as his dance partner added: “Chris actually told everybody, I heard, that people must vote for us to win.”
Evans said: “If people are coming to the show, what he said was, because he can’t be here, ‘all his fans should vote for Katya and myself’ because I think we should have got a lot further than we did.”
Hadland is set to dance with Nikita Kuzmin, who was partnered with Olympic hockey player Sam Quek for the 2024 series, instead of her professional Vito Coppola after the Italian dancer’s injury.
Coppola said he would skip the beginning of the tour over “back pain” in an interview with ITV’s This Morning on Monday, and added he would be having physiotherapy treatment to make it back on tour.
Hadland told PA that she could not “possibly imagine” performing in such a large venue at the launch event in the Utilita Arena Birmingham ahead of Friday’s tour kick-off date.
She added: “I’ve had a brief experience (being on a big stage), but this is quite different.”
The famous faces will be joined from January 17 until February 9 for the shows by Strictly judges Shirley Ballas, Anton Du Beke, Craig Revel Horwood and, for the first time on the tour, Motsi Mabuse.
The tour will also stop at Sheffield, Newcastle, Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham, with the final shows set for London’s O2 Arena.
Each performance will host a British Sign Language interpreter.
