Ultimate Strictly

ALESHA DIXON

Singer

Alesha was a member of the popular garage/R&B band Mis-Teeq, who scored two top ten albums in the UK. After the band split, Alesha has been working on her solo career, as well as presenting and appearing on many television programmes, including presenting her own documentary for BBC Three investigating the use of airbrushing and retouching that has become virtually unavoidable in magazines, leading to increasing pressure on women to try and achieve unattainable perfection in their looks.

Partnered with Matthew Cutler, Alesha competed in series five of Strictly Come Dancing. In a particularly strong series start for the female celebrities, Alesha had a reasonably quiet start with her Rumba, finishing third on the first leaderboard, but when she was given the Jive in her second week, she shone with a fantastic routine, full of energy and leapt to the top of the table with the judges. She continued to impress throughout the series, but surprised most people with the standard of her ballroom routines surpassing most of her latin dances. She reached the final, and chose to dance the beautiful Waltz (scoring 39 points) and the Cha Cha Cha (scoring 38 points), and eventually carried off the trophy as series champion.

Alesha currently holds the record for the most number of 10's received from the judges, with a total of nineteen 10's scored during her seventeen dances in both the main series and the 2008 Christmas Specials. During an interview during the last week of It Takes Two for series five, that up until that point, Jill Halfpenny had been the closest we'd seen to a professional standard of dancing, but that Alesha would now be the benchmark for all future competitors.

Strictly Come Dancing