Strictly Come Dancing’s new presenting trio have admitted the BBC show’s on-screen format is still being shaped, with Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe preparing to share hosting duties for the first time in the programme’s history.
The presenters, who are taking over from Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman, said producers deliberately chose a “wild card” approach after discovering the chemistry between them during an unusually secretive audition process.
“There’s no like for like, so no one’s kind of replacing anybody and at the minute it’s all very kind of open,” Willis told Richard Osman on The Rest Is Entertainment podcast.
She said the trio had been attending production days to experiment with the format and work out how best to divide their responsibilities before the live shows begin.
Widdicombe joked that the presenting team would operate like “total football”, adding: “We’re going to be moving everywhere.”
Willis also ruled out speculation that Radebe would be confined to a backstage reporting role, saying he “definitely” would not simply be a roving correspondent.
Strictly’s new hosts endured a secret audition process
The trio said they had each undergone a four-month audition process before being brought together for chemistry tests with other potential combinations.
Widdicombe described the arrangements as “cloak and dagger” and compared them to The Traitors. He revealed that producers even invented a fictional gardening programme, The Great Garden Glow Up, to disguise the purpose of the meetings from drivers taking contestants to auditions.
“We were told if the driver asked, he’d been told it was a show about gardening called The Great Garden Glow Up,” he said.
After auditioning separately, Willis, Widdicombe and Radebe were eventually placed in the same room, despite none of them initially knowing that the others were being considered.
Widdicombe said he was surprised when Radebe arrived, having assumed the shortlist of names reported in the press represented the likely candidates. “I’d say both of us thought that’s a weird combo,” he said.
Radebe agreed that there had been a moment of confusion, saying: “We were like what is going on here? Because we didn’t know that the three of us were going to end up in the room.”
Willis said producers told them during the final callback that the three-presenter arrangement was “a wild card” and that there was not even a fixed script for the screen test.
“We’re just like, ‘What happens if we do three?’ And they said, ‘It’s so much of a wild card, we don’t really have a script for you either. So we’re going to sit down, get it up on the screen and we’ll have a little tinker all together,’” she said.
The presenters were finally told they had secured the roles two weeks later. Willis took the confirmation call while sitting in a hairdresser’s toilet, while Widdicombe was in a graveyard in Birmingham.
Strictly Come Dancing’s 2026 launch show is due to air on BBC One on Saturday 19 September, with the live competition beginning the following week.
