BGT’s dancing OAP, 85, says it’s her brain not her body that’s failing

When she exploded on stage in a flurry of sequins, twirls and gravity-defying moves, salsa dancing pensioner Paddy Jones left the Britain’s Got Talent audience in raptures.

That was 2014 and climaxed with a hysterical Amanda Holden reaching for the golden buzzer.

Imagine, then, if they had known then what we know now – that five years later, the amazingly agile little old lady would not only still be going strong aged 85, but being thrown around the stage by partner Nico with more Spanish gusto than ever.

In the heats Britain’s Got Talent: the Champions, Paddy became the only contestant ever to get two golden buzzers – this time from David Walliams – when she was catapulted straight into tonight’s (SAT) final.

Viewers will once again get to gasp in disbelief – or hide behind the sofa – as the octogenarian is flung into the air and swung around in ways that would leave most other pensioners needing more than a hip replacement.

Incredibly, though, the grandmother-of-seven doesn’t seem the least bit concerned about how much longer her body can cope, instead insisting she’ll keep going “until Nico starts getting tired”.

And she says she’s more worried about losing her memory than her ability to fly under the legs and over the head of her Spanish dancer partner, who is 40 years her junior.

Speaking to the Daily Mirror, Paddy says: “I can still move my body fine, but it’s my brain that doesn’t function as well, you see. I forget so much at my age, which is very annoying. If Nico asks me to go through the routine on my own I wouldn’t have a clue. I can dance as well as him, but he needs to think for me.

“In the past five years I haven’t noticed any change to my physical ability, but my memory is going. I do lots and lots of crossword puzzles to try to remember things, but they sometimes take a long time.”

How long does she think she’ll go on dancing for? Paddy chuckles. “When am I going to stop? That’s what I keep asking Nico and he just looks at me and shakes his head and that’s it.

“When Nico starts getting tired, that’s when I’ll stop.

“Nico has got a mama who has been very ill and he needs to look after her too. He’s a very busy man. I don’t know how long he’ll be able to keep going. As for me, I’ll just go on as long as I can.

“But don’t expect me to still be dancing when I’m 110. Not that I’d be too frail. It’s just that when I’m that old I think I’d be so wrinkly I’ll need a facial redo or have to wear a mask to go on a stage.”

Paddy jokes that she thinks her memory loss is actually one of the reasons why she’s so fit and nimble.

“I tell people it’s my brain that’s keeping me healthy. You see, I go all the way down the 28 steps to my garage, and when I get there I can’t remember what it was I needed to go for. So I have to go all the way back up and then remind myself, and then come back down again. So I say it’s my faltering memory that’s keeping me going.”

Most twenty-somethings would even have trouble pulling off Paddy’s jaw-dropping acrobatics. But she insists she doesn’t event feel a twinge when she leaves the stage, and says she’s only ever injured herself once during her time performing with Nico – and it wasn’t on the dance floor.

The pensioner, who lives in Gandia, Spain, says: “A few years ago I was climbing a ladder at home to cut a tree and the ladder slipped and I fell on the floor.

“I cracked my ribs. It was the side that Nico was going to hold me for an upcoming dance, so he changed the whole choreography to hold me on the other side, and we were able to do the routine.”

Old folks up and down the country who worry about taking a tumble just pottering around their own homes might be asking how Paddy has kept herself in such good fettle, but the widow can’t give an answer.

She says: “I don’t do anything particularly to keep fit. I horrify people because I say I like sugar, sweets and chocolate, and condensed milk on my cereals in the morning. It's just about keeping active in between.

“I think it’s a family trait. My parent were always very active. I have a seven-year-old great granddaughter and she’s a little wisp of a thing but she plays rugby and lots of other sports.

“When I go back to England and meet up with old schoolfriend they all say, ‘you were always the active one, you were never sitting around doing nothing’. The good side to it is being an inspiration to other people.

“I get lots of emails from elderly people. Nico reads them because I’m not good with technology. It makes me happy to hear people saying that having seen me they’ve decided they ought to get out of their chairs and switch of their TVs and do something.

“What we do inspires people and makes people smile, and I’m very pleased about that.

“My grandchildren are really happy about it too. They say having me as a grandmother often gets them an extra pint in the pub!”

Paddy started dancing at the age of two-and-a-half and trained as a ballerina, and was working full-time in the theatre at the age of 17, but she gave it up aged 22 to start a family after marrying her late husband David.

Instead, she raised four children and worked six days a week in her fabric shop in Stourbridge, West Midlands.

She kept her interest in showbusiness alive by founding the Stourbridge Pantomine Company, which is still going strong today.

Paddy and David decided to relocate to Spain after she came home from work on Christmas Eve and collapsed with flu. She says: “I was terribly ill and didn’t come round until New Year’s Eve. My husband said, ‘that’s it, we’re not spending another cold winter in England’. A customer at my shop told us about the Gandia area of Spain, and we went there and it was so beautiful. We bought the first house we looked at.”

But what was supposed to be a happy move together to warner climes ended up turning to tragedy.

Paddy says: “It was the day before we were moving. We were in a house without furniture, everything was sold and everything was ready to go.

“David hadn’t been sleeping well, he was in another bedroom. And I got up and saw blood across he carpet. I called the doctor immediately, and when he came I told him we were about to emigrate to Spain.

He says: ‘I’m sorry, you’ll have to take your husband to hospital’. By that evening we’d been told that he had cancer.”

Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, David underwent several rounds of chemotherapy, while keeping a picture of their dream Spanish villa next to his bed to help him get through it.

With his cancer finally in remission, the couple finally moved to Spain in September 2001, but the leukaemia returned 18 months later and, after two more rounds of chemo failed, he was given two weeks to live.

Paddy remembers: “The medics in Britain were quite happy that he’d beaten the cancer. David had to come off the plane in a wheelchair, but once we were there in the warm weather he was soon feeling better.

“We never imagined that the cancer would come back. It was very, very difficult.”

After 47 years of marriage she was alone in Spain, but Paddy says she never once thought about returning to the UK.

She says: “Everyone thought I would, but there was no way I was coming back. It had been our dream to live in Spain, and I wanted to live that dream for both of us.

“I decided to find something to keep me busy, so I joined a salsa dance class near my home, and Nico was running it. As soon as I walked in there I knew I had come back to my first love.”

Paddy says that the first time Nico tried to throw her into the air he asked other men to stand around to catch her if she fell, but “I just went for it. I didn’t even worry about being injured.”

Since then she and Nico have won millions of fans around the world, appearing on TV talent contests including Spain’s You Are Worth It and the Argentinian equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing .

She also made it into the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest acrobatic salsa dancer.

What would David have made of her late lease of life and new-found fame?

“Oh, he would be over the moon,” said Paddy. “He couldn’t dance at all, he had two left feet, but he always encouraged me to dance again. He would be very proud of all that I have achieved.”

* Britain’s Got Talent: the Champions – Final, tonight (SAT), 8.30pm, ITV.

Source: Read Full Article