Emma Willis saved her husband from drink and drugs. Can she save Strictly?
Emma Willis saved her husband from drink and drugs. Can she save Strictly?
Stephen ArmstrongMon, May 11, 2026 at 7:24 PM UTC
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Insiders say Emma Willis is the one to turn ratings around - Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images
If the rumour that Emma Willis is going to present Strictly Come Dancing is true, then fans of the show should breathe a sigh of relief.
A producer who worked on a reality show with Willis a few years ago says: “If anyone can turn things around for Strictly, it’s her. There’s something she has on screen, a mix of vulnerability and confidence, that everyone just falls in love with.”
Willis is said to have made it through a gruelling round of auditions and “chemistry tests” and is believed to be the “new Tess Daly”, with Zoe Ball (a long-running host of Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two) taking on Claudia Winkleman’s role.
You will probably have seen Willis in one of her many presenting roles: she was being hailed as the queen of daytime TV as far back as 2014 and has hosted The Voice, Celebrity Big Brother and The Circle, among other things. But the apparent lightness of that CV should not be sneered at.
Willis, seen here on stage in 2018, previously presented Big Brother and Big Brother’s Little Brother - Jeff Spicer/Getty Images
“She is one of the most determined professionals I’ve ever worked with,” says the producer, who does not wish to be named. “If you look at her track record, you’ll see what I mean. This won’t be the first show she’s joined when things were looking shaky and she’s always worked some magic.”
Indeed, studying past viewing figures enhances Willis’s reputation as a saviour of flagging shows. For example, when she replaced Holly Willoughby on The Voice in 2014, ratings went from 7.47 million to 9.35 million in her first season. Her trajectory from presenting Big Brother’s Little Brother to helming the main show is a sign that she is a safe pair of hands, and that producers believe in her.
However, it is in her personal life that Willis’s reputation as a capable woman really comes to the fore. In 2008, she married Matt Willis, member of the Noughties boy band Busted, and helped him overcome both alcoholism and drug addiction (Matt was a former classmate of Amy Winehouse at the Sylvia Young Theatre School and the pair had taken part in notoriousdrinking sessions together).
Emma and her husband, Matt, pictured on Gogglebox together, got married in 2008 - Studio Lambert
“Along with addiction comes a lot of bad times,” said Emma in the 2023 documentary Matt Willis: Fighting Addiction. “As hard and as bad as that can be and has been, it also is part of who he is and who he is is who I love.”
Throughout that BBC film, there are emotional interviews with Emma about her refusal to give up on her husband. The opening scene finds her going through an old diary where she tallied every drink and every drug he took every day – and it was everyday.
“I used to drive around looking for him, to every local pub, but he always went to the ones I didn’t know about,” she explained, flicking through the pages of the diary. “It starts in January 2008, in the run-up to getting married. All those exciting plans you imagine in your head,” at which point her eyes filled with tears. “There were so many ways he hid things. I was so scared he would die.”
Strictly could do with the Willis effect. High-profile, recent scandals have included misconduct allegations against the professional dancers Graziano di Prima and Giovanni Pernice (which they have denied), the video of Jamie Borthwick insulting the residents of Blackpool backstage (leading to his suspension from EastEnders), and Welsh opera singer Wynne Evans’ inappropriate language, which he has since apologised for.
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Audiences have been drifting away, too, since its 2017 peak when the series averaged 11.14 million viewers. According to the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board, last year’s series averaged the 7.4 million mark, which is the second lowest in the show’s history. Only the first, which aired in 2004, performed worse.
So what precisely can Willis bring to Strictly? She is not zany like Claudia Winkleman, but she has just the right amount of personality to stop it from being a snooze fest. As well as her famous slickness, she has a natural warmth and empathy, which will be handy for dealing with fragile celebrity egos. “She just connects,” says a publicist who worked with Willis on a Channel 4 show. “People respond to her.”
Willis has shown integrity and strong interview chops when required, too. For example, there was her chat with Winston McKenzie when he was ejected from the Celebrity Big Brother house. He had made homophobic comments about gay adoption (the political activist later claimed he was targeted by the show’s producers), and Willis stood her ground in a difficult situation. She gave McKenzie a grilling and kept her fury in check.
She has also proved her worth in serious documentaries such as Swiped: The School that Banned Smartphones, which she presented with her husband.
Emma and Matt in Swiped: The School that Banned Smartphones, which aired in 2024 - Channel 4
Most impressively, Willis trained as a midwife at Watford General Hospital for the series Emma Willis: Delivering Babies. This wasn’t some flash in the pan, but a rigorous commitment that took place over several years. It is hard to think of many presenters at the same echelon who would do the same.
Of course, Strictly may not require Jeremy Paxman-style interrogation skills, but one thing it needs to survive is a fresh batch of younger fans. In terms of social media, Willis is adored: she has two million Instagram followers. That’s more than Tess Daly’s 930,000, Zoe Ball’s 779,000, and even Claudia Winkleman’s 1.3 million. As an organisation obsessed with youth, the BBC would do well to court her.
She was born Emma Griffiths in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham in 1976, started modelling aged 15, and moved to London at 17, working for magazines such as Marie Claire and Elle. She got a job at MTV in 2002 and met her husband, Matt when she was hosting the MTV Total Request Live in 2004. The show staged mock weddings between fans and members of bands, and she was a bridesmaid at Matt’s fake marriage. They soon began dating.
In a recent interview, Matt recounted their first date. “There were paparazzi outside,” he explained. “The following day’s headlines read: ‘Matt from Busted and a mystery brunette’, which is funny,” he added, “because now I’m known as ‘Emma Willis’s husband’.”
By this stage, Matt’s drinking was already a problem (his first visit to rehab was at the Priory in 2005), but Emma stepped in to help when she became worried and the couple went on to have three children: Isabelle, 16, Ace, 14, and Trixie, 10.
Willis pictured with her son, Ace, on his 11th birthday
Willis is not the kind of woman to keep her opinions to herself and in a recent newspaper interview, she delighted the journalist with her frequent use of the f-bomb. “I’m not putting on a facade, so if you don’t like me, that’s quite f---ing personal,” she said. “There was superficial criticism in my thirties, like, ‘What the f--k are you wearing?’ or ‘Your hair looks s--t’. And there was the, ‘Is she pregnant?’ – no, I’ve just got three kids, and I don’t go to the gym every day. Then the heavier stuff comes, like, ‘I f---ing hate her’, and that can really start to affect you.”
But there’s very little online hate over the new role so far, perhaps because her love of Strictly has already endeared her to fans. Last August, she was guest hosting This Morning with Joel Dommett and interviewing former Strictly professionals James Jordan, Brendan Cole, Pasha Kovalev and Ian Waite. Willis told the pros she was “a sofa dancer”, to their bemusement. “I sit there and watch it and dance on the sofa… And before I know it, everyone is looking at me, thinking ‘what are you doing?’”
Well, if Emma Willis really is about to save Strictly Come Dancing, her days of merely sofa dancing will be a thing of the past.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
