Dancing on Ice judge may be cold on telly, but you can’t help warming to him

Mar 14 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Dancing on Ice’s Jason Gardiner is the talent show judge we love to hate. Emma Pinch finds out if there’s a warm heart beating under that sub-zero exterior

HE INFAMOUSLY likened Dame Kelly Holmes to a man in drag, and she’ll now have nothing to do with him.

Does he regret being so vicious?

He pauses to consider. “Not really, no.”

Jason Gardiner is as deliciously bitchy off screen as he is on, and upliftingly unrepentant.

He was merciless with tennis star Greg Rusedski and his giraffe-on-ice style of skating –“a big joke”, sniffs Gardiner – and by now we know that, when that sleepy smile spreads across his face, like the moment a shark’s eyes roll back in its head, a bloody attack is imminent. And though we boo, we secretly love it.

Often pigeon-holed as – his words: “an acid-tongued bitchy queen” Gardiner goes from snooty – he’d be very surprised if an interviewer managed to ask him anything original – to emphatic on the subject of whether he’s just out to out-Cowell Simon Cowell.

“By and large, people in the street who watch the show absolutely love what I do and are thankful to have somebody calling it like it really is,” he says. “We don’t have any defined roles. The producers lucked out when they found someone with my reputation.

“I use colourful descriptive analysis because, if I was to use technical jargon, celebs are not going to understand it and the viewers are going to get very bored,” he continues emphatically. “I miss nothing and I have a maximum of 10 seconds to get my point across, and even though it’s like I slap them, I do it because it’s the kick up the backside they need to improve.”

His perspective on the celebrities’ involvement is clear-eyed.

“People think I’m being very harsh because they’re doing something different and dangerous, but they’re being paid a hell of a lot of money to do this,” he says firmly. “They’re doing it in front of 10m people every week. It’s very good for their profiles.

“It would be different if they wanted to become real ice dancers. You can’t sell me this ‘Oh, poor little celebrity’ thing. To me, it’s fair game.”

He insists he only criticises how they perform, not what they are. What about Dame Kelly? It’s easy to see how she might have taken the “woman in drag” thing personally.

The media took it out of context, he explains. “I said because her physical body was so impressive for a woman, if she didn’t soften her lines and become more graceful, she runs the risk of looking like a man in drag. It really offended her because she only heard what she wanted to hear. She did soften her lines after she watched it back.” Just when the cruel-to-be-kind rationale is working, he goes and ruins it. “She did skate like a bulldog in a dress, though,” he shrugs. “That’s the bottom line.”

Now 36, Jason left his native Australia 12 years ago to pursue a career as a dancer in London, and his experiences there go some way to explaining the man we see today. Adopted as a baby, he says he got his “twisted” sense of humour from his quick-witted Aussie grandmother, whose house he used to go to during the week at primary school in Melbourne while his parents worked.

“She had these classic sayings, one for every occasion. For example, if she saw a couple who were really, really unattractive she’d turn to me and say in her Australian accent, ‘that just proves, Jason, there’s a seat for every a*se‘. I know I’ve definitely gained a lot of that from her.”

Growing up in the macho culture of Australia, being gay and being a male dancer, and subject to the continual rejection his profession entails, he had to grow a tough hide.

“No matter how good you get, you’re never that good and it perforates your whole life,” he says.

“Dancers are the lowest rung of the pecking order and the first to get cut, shouted at or abused if things aren’t going right. And if you were a male dancer in Australia that equated to being a second class citizen. You had to come to wonderful cities like London where you weren’t vilified or bullied or traumatised.”