Dr Louise Newson [00:00:00] I really want you to help, because we've found out that this podcast has been nominated for the Listeners Choice Award, which is with the British Podcast Awards. We need your vote, so if you go to the show notes and click on the link, I really hope we can do this. So, thank you.

Dr Louise Newson [00:00:19] So I'm really excited that Angela Rippon came on my podcast today. As some of you know, she's the first female news reader on the BBC, and more recently, she's become really well known for her stint on strictly doing the splits, but we talk a lot about preventing diseases and what dance can do for all of us. So if you're not inspired to join the local dance class after this, you're never going to be, so I hope you enjoy it.  

Dr Louise Newson [00:00:51] Angela Rippon, I feel quite nervous because I have grown up watching you and been really inspired by a woman news reading, which now in 2025, it doesn't sound very much, does it? But it was so important.

Angela Rippon [00:01:01] I have to say, it's quite rewarding when I meet younger women in television now, because I'm now 80, coming up to 81, and this was back in the 1970s, 1976. There were no women reading the national news. The interesting thing is, there were lots of us in the regions doing it, but there wasn't, and there hadn't been a woman since a lady called Nan Winton who was there for about six weeks. But they didn't have long bulletins. They just had sort of, you know, the five-minute bulletin. They didn't have long news programs. And She lasted about six weeks before she was taken off air because it was felt that women didn't have the authority and the gravitas to be able to be newsreaders, and that was way back in the like early 50s. So when, when I joined BBC television news as a reporter and a correspondent, it was one of those sort of odd things by chance, that they asked me to sit in and read the news, something that I'd done in the regions very happily for a long time. So, it wasn't a difficult job to do, but of course, and I don't think, to be absolutely honest, I don't think, at the time, I was aware of quite exactly how groundbreaking it was. I knew it was different because, of course, all the men in all the television news readers at the BBC, when I was a reporter, were the men, it was Richard Baker, it was Kenneth Kendall, it was Peter Woods, it was (Richard) Whitmore. I mean, it was men.

Dr Louise Newson [00:02:28] Yes.

Angela Rippon [00:02:29] But because I read the news before, it didn't occur to me that it was that different. It was just an extension of what I'd already done and what I knew I could do. But the impact was huge, so much so that, thank goodness. A few weeks later, ITV, with the News at Ten, brought in Anna Ford to read the news at 10. So she was there at 10 o'clock on ITV, and I was there at nine o'clock on the BBC.

Angela Rippon [00:02:55] But it's lovely now when I meet young women who say, it just reminds me of the age gap when they say, ‘I used to do my homework and watching you read the six o'clock news and think, I can do that’, and they now do, or they're now journalists, or they're working in some form of television and I do get a little sort of, free sort of pleasure from the fact that young women who watched me doing the job felt, well, if she can do that, so can I, and now they are.

Dr Louise Newson [00:03:23] Yes, and I think, like I never wanted to be a news reader, but just to see somebody so calm, so eloquent, doing the job, often better than the men, but just you were just there, you just have this presence, which was great, because it's the calmness that you were in control, whereas women almost weren't allowed to be in control in the 70s.  

Angela Rippon [00:03:43] No, what I think is wonderful now. I mean, I've coming up to September the fifth this year. It'll be 59 years since I did my very first broadcast. So we're talking about six decades. And in that time, what has been wonderful, because I've continued to work, in not just news and current affairs, but in other aspects of television as well, to see the number of women that have come well. I mean, it was a male dominated profession when I, when I started in it, all those years ago. But now, you know, there are women producers, directors, editors, camera operators, sound engineers, editors, production assistants, controllers, the controller of the BBC was Charlotte Moore. She's been replaced by Kate Phillips. You know, there are women executives. There are women making television programs, great women documentary directors. And it's wonderful now to walk into any television studio and see the number of women that there are, not overtaking men, but working alongside them. And what I what I do find very gratifying is a number of male executives with whom I still work, who have not grown up with the old boys network, but have grown up alongside the women who are good at what they do, and men now in executive positions, recognise the women in their teams that are good. It's now a profession in which women really can hold their heads up high and say, this is a job I can do, and you now recognise it, which is so wonderful.  

Dr Louise Newson [00:05:14] And then I don't know the year, but you will know the year that the desk was moved away, and you showed everyone that you're a dancer as well.

Angela Rippon [00:05:23] 1976  

Dr Louise Newson [00:05:24] 1976, yeah. How long did you plan that?  

Angela Rippon [00:05:27] Oh, I hadn't planned it, I was sitting in the newsroom. I was reading the nine o'clock and six o'clock, and all the news bulletins for the BBC at that time. And the telephone rang, and a voice on the end said, ‘My name's Ernest Maxim, I'm the producer for Eric and Ern, and the boys would like you to be in their Christmas show’. And I sort of nearly fell off my chair. I said, well, what would you like me to do? And he said, ‘Well, can you sing?’ I said, well, not unless you want me to clear the studio in 30 seconds. But, but I can dance a bit, because I studied ballet and classical ballet and tap and modern dance until I was 17, so I can dance a bit. Oh, that'll do. He said, because he himself was a choreographer, brilliant as well as a television producer. 23 depending on which, which RAJAR you look at, it was either 23 or 26 million people who tuned in. And it did make an impact, and it's lovely, because I still get people coming up to me saying, what was it like to dance with Eric and Ernie? Because, of course, both of them sadly, are no longer with us.

Dr Louise Newson [00:06:28] I watched it again recently, and it was just so happy. So lovely. And it was that sort of, firstly, she's got legs! You know we only see, because there was that as well. Wasn't there, and it's so different now, because we've got social media, and we see almost too much about everybody, but we didn't know much about you, and then to see you dance in such a relaxed way.  

Angela Rippon [00:06:46] I mean, it's like actors. Actors can be a villain in one thing. They can be a, you know, a dosshouse dweller in another, they can be a champion in another. That's what you do as an actor. Because, you know, every human being has lots of sides to their nature. If you're a television news reader, you tend to see just that one side. I mean, I'd worked in television a long time before then doing all sorts of stuff, but they see you as a news reader, as being someone who is very, sort of straight-laced and very serious, and don't necessarily, it doesn't trigger in someone's mind when they're watching you, that there's another side to your character, that you can have a sense of humuor, you can do something for fun. And I think what is nice is that (BBC) Children in Need every year, Subsequently, it's developed over the years, but it's allowed news readers, just all the news readers, the men and the women. Because the following year for, of course, in the Eric and Ern Christmas show, they got all the men, they got all the newsreaders and the sports presenters and Michael Parkinson and all the men on telly to do something that was completely out of their comfort zone. And I think it sort of opened the door to saying, you know, we work on television, and we work in news and current affairs, which is a serious business dealing with serious world, international and local events. But actually, there's a side to us that that is a bit different. And once a year, it's nice to let your hair down and just see that there is a human being behind the television camera. And I think perhaps it opened the door. That was one thing that did smash through the glass ceiling and help people to do I think.

Dr Louise Newson [00:08:18] Absolutely. And you know your dance is so important, and it continues to be the core of everything that you do, almost. And you know my work as a doctor is about trying to keep people healthy. I went into medicine because I wanted to help people and reduce suffering. But more importantly, as I've got older, it's not about treating diseases. It's about preventing diseases. The leading causes of death worldwide in women are heart disease, cardiovascular disease and dementia. But not far behind. Obviously, there's cancers, there's, you know, diabetes, obesity is associated with so many diseases, even the landscape, I qualified in 1994 so even over the last 30 years, has been a massive change in the patients, and actually their responsibility in the NHS is responsibility. And you know, the NHS was, it still is a fabulous place to work, but it's very, very different. We had a lot more time with our patients. Even when I did psychiatry, we would talk about exercise. There would be swimming pools for physio, there would be all sorts of things that there just isn't now. And you know, I feel very responsible being a mother of three children, that they need to have responsibility for what they do, what they put in their mouth, whether they exercise or not, the choices that they make, but the work you're doing is so, so important. It's, in my mind, more important than prescribing a blood pressure treatment or a statin to lower cholesterol, because it's preventative. And you know, people only need to look at you and see how important exercise has been and kept you, I'm sure, as healthy as you are, you would be very different if you hadn't continued your dancing. I'm sure don't you agree?  

Angela Rippon [00:10:08] Yes. I mean, oh, there's so so much in what you've just said to answer. I mean, I'm glad to hear you say that it should be prevention. It should be prevention always, rather than cure, because if you can prevent things happening in the first place, you do not need expensive pharmaceuticals or expensive hospital treatment. When I was in my 20s, I interviewed a lady called Eileen Fowler, who some of your listeners may remember, if they're my generation, certainly she was the sort of Jane Fonda of the 40s and 50s. She started a lot of the exercise and dance movement in this country. And during the course of the interview, she was, I, I was in my 20s, she was in her 60s. She sort of bounced into the studio, touching her toes and she said, she said something quite profound during the interview. She said, what you have to remember, Angela, is that the body is, is a machine, like any machine. It's full of millions of moving parts. And if you don't look after a machine, if you don't feed it well, you don't oil it, you don't use it, it will seize up and rust, whether it's car, a lawn mower, a pair of scissors, whatever, and the body will do the same. You have to keep it moving. And I've remembered that all my life, and followed that. And because I'm very fortunate that when, when I was little girl, when I was five, I was sent to a dance class because I had locked knees, in my generation, you know, we had a lot of problems because children, perhaps, you know, had not been fed properly.  

Angela Rippon [00:10:08] I was born in 1944, by the time I was five or six, you know, we were still on rationing, so food was not as plentiful as, or as healthy as it is now, and our family doctor said to my mother, well, we can either give her built up shoes to part the knees, or I suggest you send her to a dance class. Strengthen my legs, and thank goodness my mother sent me to a dance class. So dance has been part of my life since I was about five, and it sort of moved in and out of my life. It was there until I was 17 when I was studying classical ballet and tap and all the rest of the modern dance things. Then I settled down to my academic work. I got into newspapers. I did my apprenticeship as a photojournalist, as a journalist and a photographer. Then I got into television, and when they asked me, I was 37 I think when they asked me to do Eric and Ern, to do the Morecambe and Wise Show, and I went back to my ballet class. And it was interesting, because I kept very fit up until then, doing all sorts of different things. But I went back to the ballet class, and it was interesting because my mind knew exactly what I needed to do, having that memory doing Pliés, doing Arabesque, whatever. And my body was saying, what the heck do you think you are doing?

Angela Rippon [00:12:51] And so that got me back on the path again of going back to dance. And so because of that, as a result of Eric and Ern, I've subsequently done two Royal Variety Performances where I've danced, and most recently Strictly Come Dancing. But what it's meant is, and I've made documentaries about dance, I made a whole series of documentaries, one of them about Hoofers. When I was doing a series called How to Stay Young, I included something about dance that was being done at a university in Germany, where they were actually pitting people from 60 to 90, in a group of 20 dancers against 20 people of the same age group in a gym. And they were being monitored, their health responses were being monitored by a wonderful doctor who was looking at what was happening to their lungs, to their hearts, to them, to their muscles, to every part of their body. And at the end of six months, the dancers came out as the fittest and the strongest. And dance was therefore seen in a properly maintained experiment, to be the best way of exercising your mind and your body, because you have to use your brain at the same time, which affects all sorts of different things.  

Angela Rippon [00:14:04] And so throughout my career as a television presenter, I've been able to indulge my passion of dance with my profession, in television. And when they asked me to do Strictly Come Dancing, which was now, nearly two years ago, my, I was 79 and my reaction at the time was, why didn't you ask me 10 years ago? I mean, I'd presented Come Dancing. I thought so, I'm too old. I'm too old to do that, but I thought I would do it, and even if I got thrown out after the first week, I didn't want to be thrown out the first week, didn't last at least one or two weeks, at least I would could say I had done it. I had wonderful partner in Kai Widdrington, who, I mean, is a brilliant dancer, but a great teacher. And he and I became, I mean, we laughed the minute we met, and we have not stopped laughing since, he was 29 so he's, he's 51 years younger than me, but we got on like a house on fire.

Angela Rippon [00:15:00] And he would say, can you do so and so and so and so? And I'd say, I don't know. Let's find out, and we'd do it. And we discovered that I could get my leg to here, that I could do double splits, that I could dance. I'd never done ballroom or Latin, but I could, you know, with the six hours a day training that we did, I could do it. And the reaction that I got from that, from the general public, was that they voted for us, and we stayed in for nine weeks and got to Blackpool. But the reaction was that, surprisingly, it was the older generation, men and women who said that I was an inspiration, that if I could do it at seventyy nine, they could. Young people as well. I had parents saying, my grandson or my son or my daughter, that they're only 12, but they're voting for you because they say, Granny can't do that, so I'm going to vote for Ange, which was great. And I thought, at my stage of life now I'm, I mean, I'm still fully employed making television programs, but I thought this is the moment when I think, with that kind of profile, with 10 million people a week tuning in, I want to use my passion for dance, my knowledge of the benefit dance brings, as the health and wellbeing to your mind as well as your body. What can I do to persuade the nation that dance is not just a wonderful thing to watch and entertainment, it is the best form of exercise for your mind and your body. How can I get that message across?  

Angela Rippon [00:16:36] And I got in touch with all because I've been involved with dance for so long, with the English National Ballet, where I was chairman and on the board for what, nearly 14 years in total, I think, with the Royal Ballet, with Royal Academy of Dance, with lots of the other dance organisations, I thought they're all as teachers doing wonderful work, individually within their classes all over the country, 50,000 teachers and more doing fantastic work, but they're doing it individually, in silos. If I can bring them together, and get dance to speak with one voice and say and it needed that, because I did have someone say to me, well, you do realise there are politics involved in this course. And if you get that lot to sit in the room with that lot, you know hell will freeze over before that happens. Well, hell froze over. And they did all come together, and we launched, Let's Dance!

Angela Rippon [00:17:28] And it was wonderful because I heard Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, saying, on the radio, in an interview, we all have to take more responsibility for our own health. If we did, it would really ease the burden on the National Health Service, not just financially, but physically, the number of hours that you need to get spend in hospital, the facilities that you need from hospital, the time you spend with a GP. So I rang him, and I said, Chris, if I can bring the dance world together and get people to dance, which we know because of all the all the evidence-based material, which says dance can do this, will you back me? And he said, yes. And he has from day one, as has Lord Darzi who did the report for the government, because I then spoke to him, and he said, Yes, this is exactly what we need to do. So I brought them all together. We spent a year planning it, and on March the second of this year, we had some 20,000 dance teachers and dance organisations all over the country open their doors and say to people, we got the BBC to back us. I got The One Show to show films about the way in which dance helped people with mental health problems, with Parkinson's, with stroke...  

Angela Rippon [00:18:42] Young children in education, communities, how it brought ethnic groups together, all of that, they did a series of films. So we had a lot of people who knew what Let's Dance! was doing. And on the day, we had some 20,000 dance teachers opening their doors, saying to people, come take a workshop, see what we do. Have a class, do something. And we have a professor of dance, Professor Angela Pickard, who is at the moment assessing the results from that, and they are outstanding. I mean, to give you an example, The Royal Ballet School. Everybody might think, Oh, that's a bit posh. The Royal Ballet School,  which is a school to teach. It teaches young people on grants to become professional dancers. It is not open to the public for dance classes. They opened their doors in their headquarters in London. They have so many studios there, they had four studios running simultaneously, offering classes in mime, ballet, modern dance and theatre  dance, from nine in the morning until six in the evening, more than 650 people went through, and they had just under 1,000 on their waiting list to do it. We had dance. We had people in Northern Ireland, wonderful individual teachers. But we had hubs. We had two big hubs in Northern Ireland, one in Portrush, where a wonderful teacher there called Victoria, she took over the car park on the seafront, and where the council had erected a marquee, she got, I think it was 17 dance teachers to come, and they had a full day of dance, and hundreds of people went through, and the local cinemas only showed musical films. So it was dance. The Eden Project in Cornwall gave us one of their domes. We had, the King gave us permission to use Dumfries house in Scotland, and we had something like nearly 200 pensioners who came and danced all day.

Angela Rippon [00: 20:39] The Winter Gardens in Blackpool. Of course, we had to have something special in Blackpool. Things happening all over the country, with people dancing, and subsequently, Let's Dance! now is going to happen every year. On it's going to be March the eighth next year, but at the same time, I managed to get meetings with the NHS, and the NHS have agreed that dance, they recognise the value of dance in so many medical situations like stroke and Parkinson's and mental health and obesity and the rest of it, and we can now use NHS logo to ratify everything that we do. So all of our teachers who do an event that's a Let's Dance! event can say this has the support of the NHS, because the value, its health, value, is recognised. I'm working with so many of the charities like Parkinson's UK, for instance, where Caroline Russell, Charlotte Russell, rather, who is their CEO, who says dance is a miracle, which it is for people with Parkinson's, because those who have uncontrolled movements, there's a part of the brain called hippocampus, which is here at the back, which is very powerful. It's apparently the last part of the brain to go when you have dementia, for instance, because it remembers words and music.  

Angela Rippon [00:21:56] Well, it's a very important part of your brain if you have Parkinson's, because the hippocampus takes over, and people with Parkinson's certainly in the very early stages, they are able to take back control of their bodies, and the music enables them to move in time with the music and control those uncontrollable actions. It improves their gait. It improves their mobility. So apparently, there are 153,000 people in Britain who are registered as suffering from Parkinson's. 50,000 of them get dance classes. I want the other 103,000 to have dance classes, for people in who are 60 plus, all the medical evidence, the Medical Research Council, their own figures say that in an in a single year, on average, 1.6 million people over 60 will have a fall and break an ankle, a hip, a wrist, shoulder do damage to themselves, which means time in hospital. It may be only a week, if it's a minor injury. It could be a month if it's longer than that.  

Angela Rippon [00:23:04] As a result, many of them may lose not just their mobility, but their confidence and they don't want to go out afterwards. I always say to people, to younger people, think of dance as making an investment in your wellbeing pension plan. You are building your core strength, your mobility, because you have got back your core strength, and you've got back your posture, you're able to sort of pull back, from it and perhaps prevent you having a fall. Or if you do, you will fall in a way that will not lead to major injury. And if you're on the ground, you're going to be able to get up, because you've got all of that strength back in your body. And if we can do that, we could save the National Health Service anything up to 4 billion a year, because that's what it costs! And that's the Medical Research Council's own figures. It's not mine. You know. There are so many areas, and for people with mental health, two of the mental health charities with whom we're working. One of them their CEO, she says it's wonderful to see people who have been depressed or stressed dancing because they dance out of their darkness, because the one, there are two things that dance do for you that no other exercise will.

Angela Rippon [00:24:17 ] They use literally every part of your body simultaneously. If you it's what I get people to do when I do lectures, I say, get up and dance. Just do any old thing. You'll find you're using your toes, your feet, your ankles, your knees, your thighs, your hips, your back, your shoulders, your arms, your head, every bit of you is moving. It has to. It's moving simultaneously. And I defy anybody to dance without a smile on their face, because it brings joy. I've never seen anyone come off a cross trainer after half an hour sweating in their lycra saying that was fun. It doesn't work like that, but dance gives you all of those things.

Dr Louise Newson [00:24:51] Yeah, and I remember, because we both had the privilege of talking at the Oxford Longevity Project (Smart Ageing Summit) recently, and Professor Sir Muir Gray, who's  so inspirational, and it just caught me, because we always encourage exercise, and I feel very strongly as a doctor, it's not about which exercise, it's one that you enjoy and that you'll keep on doing, keep doing. Because you could tell me that I need to go running, and I would say, Yes, Angela, I might do it once, but I know I wouldn't do it every day, but my exercise is yoga. I do yoga every morning, and I really, really enjoy it, but it's about moving. But the thing that you really said that that stuck with me is about being happy, but also about using your brain and using your memory. And it's not just actually for remembering those dance moves. When you got us all to dance in the conference. It was a great song, It's Raining Men.  

Angela Rippon [00:25:47] Yes

Dr Louise Newson [00:25:47]  I used to live in New Zealand as a junior doctor, just for a year. We went to this nightclub, and it was very iconic. And they had these drag queens. And I'd never seen drag queens before. This was many years ago, they were on the stage. This song would come out, and we would all dance. So you took me back to Auckland just in those few seconds because I hadn't heard the song for a long time. And you were absolutely right. People that weren't even really communicating in the conference. They were laughing, they were happy. They were, there's this sense of camaraderie as well. And you know, so often in our jobs, in our workplaces, schools, we're quite isolated. We're on our phones all the time. We're not engaging with people. Sometimes conversations can be hostile or awkward. You don't have to talk, but you can smile and you can be, and it's that sort of warmth and energy, as well as doing exercise, which we know any exercise will reduce risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, diabetes, and so forth. You know, we talk about preventing disease. Absolutely, but even those people that have diseases, you know, not just the neurodegenerative diseases, the metabolic diseases, those can all reverse and improve or stabilise. They're not going to get worse by dancing, and even if you're just sitting, tapping your fingers because you can't you're disabled, you're listening to the music. It's got something there.  

Angela Rippon [00:27:07] It's interesting. You talk about that communication. I always say you're never isolated and lonely if you go to a dance class, which is why, again, one of the charities with whom we're working, are the Carers Trust, because carers very often feel whether they're isolated and lonely and it's important that we get children to dance for again, for that same reason, where we've got dance in schools, and sadly, it's, it's, it's on a downward curve, rather than an upward one. There are fewer and fewer schools who have got dance where they do have dance, they have less absenteeism, less exclusions. They have children who concentrate more. And I met a professor at a at another conference who is an economics professor, and she is doing she's doing a proper research program at the moment to demonstrate that if you dance, your mental acuity improves to such a degree that you become much more effective at your job. You become better at it because you're happier, but your brain works, and you become much more productive. It works for older people, but it works for children too. If you one of the schools that we filmed at, they have three primary schools that are all interconnected, and if my memory serves me correct, the figures are that there are 97% of the children come from ethnic backgrounds, and they have 47 different languages in the school. So in the primary school, they use dance as a way of helping children to understand mathematics, politics, the environment, to connect with their own ethnicity and their own culture. And the day that we filmed them, they were learning about astronomy, about how the planets move around each other. Dance, it can be used as part of education, and it does fire up your brain. It just keeps it and of course, for people with dementia, there's singing for the brain, because, again, the hippocampus helps you. You may not recognise the person sitting in front of you to whom you've been married for 60 years, but you remember the song. If you play a Beatles track, you can remember the song.

Angela Rippon [00:29:20] And it's the same with dance. You play music for people with dementia, and they want to dance. They get up because there is something in it. Two days ago with Kai Widdrington, who has is working with me on this project. He was my dance partner on strictly, he particularly wants to get dance back into schools, because as a young boy who came up in that way himself. He recognises the value of it. We were invited to go to the royal Chelsea Hospital in London to see the Chelsea Pensioners, and we spent the morning teaching a group of about 30 or 20 or 30 of them. They wanted us to go and dance with them. So we did. And so we gave them a lesson, and we taught them how to do a basic waltz.

Angela Rippon [00:30:00] And we taught them how to do a basic Cha Cha, and we all danced together. And you know what was lovely? One of the one of the pensioners there that I, that I was dancing with in the lesson, he said, I'm so glad you've come today. He said, What is wonderful? I used to dance with my wife like this. It was just one of those moments where you went. He said, My wife and I used to dance together all the time, he said, and just doing this with you now brings back so many happy memories. It gives you goose flesh, doesn't it? One of my wonderful teachers, she said to me, you've got to think of dance as a superpower, because that's what it does. It touches you, not just physically. It touches you emotionally. And you know, if you go to an event, if you go to a family occasion, if people want to be happy, they play music, and everybody gets up and dances. And I don't care if people say guys particularly say to me, but I can't dance. I got two left feet. I Dad dance. I don't care. I love dad dancing, because dad dancing means you dance like there's nobody watching, you dance because you want to. It doesn't matter if you're not quite in time with the music. If you're doing something which is outrageous and not the same as everybody else, you are doing something which is expressing your own personal joy, and you are having the time of your life while you're doing it.  

Angela Rippon [00:31:50] One of my very great friends is an Italian and he Italian families. You know, they have big Italian occasions. And there it was, one of his nieces was getting married. His cousin said to him, I don't think I'm going to invite mum because she's got dementia and she won't understand it. And he said, No!  Ange she says she's still got to come. And he said, So I persuaded him to let his mum come. And when I saw him later, I said, How did it go? He said, Oh, it was fantastic. He said, she didn't have a clue who the pretty girl in the white frock was. She didn't know who the young man that was handsome was that she danced with, but she chatted to people, she sang along to the music she danced. She had the time of her life. She thoroughly, she didn't remember any of it two days later, but she enjoyed the moment. And when it comes to dementia, what you learn is that it doesn't matter that people don't remember what happened yesterday, but they enjoy the moment. So never, never, never exclude somebody from dementia with a family occasion or, you know, to watch your local football team, or go down the pub or go to the Women's Institute, or go to a theatre or cinema, or just go out for a drink. They won't remember tomorrow, and they may be slightly, you know, out of it, a bit, when you're at the event, and they may do crazy things.

Angela Rippon [00:32:38] I remember one little boy saying to me, his grandfather, I love growing up with my granddad, because he does the daftest things, and we just have so much fun. They will enjoy the moment dance does that as well. It is a superpower!

Dr Louise Newson [00:32:51] I could listen to you forever, but I'm so grateful for you being here, really. And I'm just hoping listeners are going to look up their local dance class. Get out there. But I always end my podcast with three take home tips. And it's going to be very obvious what I'm going to ask you, just three quick tips. Why should we take up dancing?

Angela Rippon [00:33:11] Because it is the best exercise for the health of the wellbeing, of your mind and your body. You can do it at any age, and it doesn't matter what your physical condition is. If you are someone who is infirm and is in a wheelchair, you can move a bit of you. And we do lots of exercises for people in chairs and in wheelchairs. I was in Marks & Spencer a couple of months ago, and one of the girls behind the desk, she said, to be here, and she said, I'm not as flexible as you. I can hardly even touch my toes. She's only about 50. And I said, Well, that's because you don't practice it. So she's behind the desk serving me, and I'm the other side giving her exercises that she can do to bend. I was in the shop about two weeks ago, and I saw her, and she waved at me from across the store, and she said, Ange, I can touch my toes!

Angela Rippon [00:34:00] So it doesn't matter what your age is, what your physical condition is, dance is the superpower, that will mean that the engine that you've got will keep moving. It's been my ambition to die young, as late as possible, and that's what dance will help you to do.  

Dr Louise Newson [00:34:18] ah, thank you so much. It's just been great listening to you. Thank you.  

Angela Rippon [00:34:22] Thank you.