Strictly star slams Shirley Ballas and Craig Revel Horwood for making show 'uncomfortable'

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Two-time Strictly champion Oti Mabuse, who left the BBC show in 2022, launched into a rant about Shirley Ballas and Craig Revel Horwood on her visualised podcast The Fifth Judge,…

Two-time Strictly champion Oti Mabuse, who left the BBC show in 2022, launched into a rant about Shirley Ballas and Craig Revel Horwood on her visualised podcast The Fifth Judge, which she co-hosts with husband and fellow professional dancer Marius Iepure. The duo were discussing last Saturday's show when former Strictly pro Oti described it as "madness" due to harsh scoring from both head judge Shirley and Craig.

She said: "First, what was going on with the judging? The judging, I thought, was crazy." Marius disagreed, telling his wife: "I loved it", which prompted her to exclaim in shock: "You loved it? There’s no way!" Marius explained: "It wasn’t boring, first of all." Oti then acknowledged: "It wasn’t boring, yes, but I think some people were massively underscored and it was so uncomfortable to watch, and then I thought other people were massively overscored."

Oti believes that Shirley's stint as a guest judge on Dancing with the Stars in America, where she made headlines for her low scores, inspired her to "play that role of the mean judge" on Strictly too, but, in the UK, Craig is usually the toughest member of the panel, meaning they ended up competing with one another.

Continuing her rant, Oti shared: "This is what I think, I think Shirley last week went to America, was the mean judge, got all the press.

"She flipped Dancing with the Stars upside down, she came back to Strictly, she flipped Strictly upside down and then Craig said, 'that’s my job. You can do that in America, but my job is to be the mean judge here, and if you’re going to be mean, I have to be just as meaner.'

"And so what it did to me is, it made me go, ‘ah, this is such a sad show, because I can see these couples are working so hard’. And I feel like the two of them, Shirley and Craig, didn't make it about the couples, they made it about themselves.

"They made it about who can play that role of the mean judge and they completely took away the hard work that you put in as a professional and as a…

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