Save the last dance: how Torvill and Dean put Nottingham on the ice dancing map

I think we watched it in black and white. Apparently, not everyone in the country was watching the same coverage. Some regions had the feed from America, some got the British crew’s pictures, others were watching with the rest of the planet, from the Yugoslavian host broadcaster JRT, with commentary for the UK. To complicate matters further, the BBC had concerns about JRT so also broadcast the event through a handheld camera.

I cannot remember which of these we were watching. My brother says he “associates it with Des Lynam” and he recalls the subsequent Bolero saturation. My Mum says a friend told her that Radio Rentals turned their sets in the window, so the screens faced out to the street, but maybe they always did that? I also have a second-hand memory of thousands assembling in Market Square to watch it together. I really don’t know about any of that. I just know I watched it. 

Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean were born in the late 1950s and trained together at the Nottingham Ice Stadium, now rebuilt as the National Ice Centre and re-opened by Jayne in 2000.  Chris was from a Calverton mining family and began his career as a police officer. Jayne had come from a Clifton estate and had worked in insurance, from parents who worked at Raleigh and the Lace Market. When Chris’s parents split up, the hard impact of this on his childhood was offset by his stepmother giving him a pair of ice skates. Jayne was first taken to the Ice Centre on a school trip. Both had some success on the ice before they met, but they first began training together in 1975. Sliding doors.

So nine years later here they were, at the Olympics, not only winning gold but with a perfect score. It was objectively ‘massive’. I remember some frisson from their costumes and the speculation about their relationship status. The maximum scores they were awarded were unprecedented. But now, forty years on from the victory parade where Torvill and Dean were given the freedom of the city, and just ahead of their final concerts, it’s much more clearly ‘up there’ with the most exceptional moments in the history of Nottingham.

A decade ago, at the thirty-year mark, Jared Wilson interviewed the pair for these pages. They reflected on the Nottingham City Council grant that got them to the Olympics, and Jared got some further lowdown on their teenage ‘dabble’ which had previously only been revealed to Piers Morgan. It ended quickly and skating was the sole focus. 

Billy Ivory’s 2018 film Torvill & Dean (shown on ITV on Christmas day) explores their chemistry in a more nuanced way. Poppy Lee Friar and Will Tudor play the skaters and Ivory’s work captures something which, with hindsight, was perhaps always there, but escaped articulation at a Nottingham comprehensive school in the mid 1980s. He put it this way in an interview with Drama Quarterly:  

“I think they made sacrifices for their art, rather than their sport. For me, that’s an even more noble thing to do,” he says. “We see where they come from and we see their circumstances. They had no money, no help. They came from really simple backgrounds, and to achieve what they did, I think it’s really worth celebrating. We’re not great at celebrating our heroes in this country, and we should do with them.”

I think back in 1984 we understood the rags to riches aspect of their story. This is Nottingham, home of Robin Hood and the success of Forest in the decade before. That part made sense and defined how they were different in their sport. But Ivory brought to the surface a ‘suffering artist’ dimension and now we can revisit those memories through this lens. His film portrays Chris as someone who finds it hard to express his feelings and its testimony to Ivory, himself a very prominent product of Nottingham, that he had the craft and guile to work with Chris and Jayne and gain their trust to unravel this aspect of their partnership which had been obscured by the more obvious ‘are they, will they?’ love interest on the part of media and public alike.

When Notts TV launched, in 2014, the channel’s first screening was of a mass Bolero with thousands of Nottingham folk recreating the act outside a range of the city settings. Torvill and Dean themselves appeared. This choice says something about the importance of that Olympic perfection for Nottingham. Ok, perhaps it is easier to create a viral ‘crowd-chained’ homage of a performance to music than, say, the works of DH Lawrence or Charlie Palmer leaping over Stuart Pearce (or, OK, yes, Trevor Francis at Malmo). But logistics aside, this was a re-appraisal for the network age, locating Torvill and Dean’s Bolero as a signifier of Nottingham, as iconic folklore, in the zeitgeist, a community generated digital tapestry. Torvill and Dean, by the people and of the people.  

Back to Sarajevo, it was not only a flawless performance but a case of sportspeople as avant garde artists, refusing to compromise their creativity when, apparently, all around them were advising caution. This was 1984, the days of ‘Two Tribes’, the cold war and, back home, in these parts, the miners’ strike. The old adage – sport and politics. And they were in Yugoslavia! But these were different layers of politics. The politics of dancing, even. 

Torvill and Dean had prepared a traditional routine, evoking 42nd Street. But then, together, changed course, with The Bolero. We saw them kneeling on the ice facing each other, a strategy to add extra time, as the piece is too long for the competition’s rules, but the same rules stipulate that the time starts when the ice skates hit the rink. Kneeling is not skating.

None of this was apparent to me in the eighties. I was failing to apply myself at school, frequenting Meadow Lane and Trent Bridge, reading the NME, running the gauntlet of approval at Selectadisc and supping cider on Way Ahead concert tours. I understood that two ice skaters from the city had done something incredible in their sport, but their sport was off radar. But I was into subculture, indie music and alternative art, the four pillars of hip hop, Dylan, the Beat poets and fanzines. Did I miss something obvious about Torvill and Dean, at the time? Was Nottingham at the vanguard of the counter-culture on the ice rink? Were they the Sleaford Mods of the times? Did I miss all this? Well, maybe.

In a 2017 paper titled Sport as art, dance as sport, Canadian academic Jason Holt observes how a performance can be categorised as art in a showcase but not in the competitive moment of the event. Holt rejects this distinction and its ‘unwarranted assumptions’, citing Torvill and Dean’s Bolero as the key example in arguing that this debate is wrongly “neglecting the equally viable question of whether art in some form may also count as sport. I conclude in favour of an appropriately qualified sport-as-art thesis.”

So, looking back; it was a bigger deal than I knew at the time. For now, the finale will be big, drawing the curtain on this incredible career and the professional lives of these two holders of the keys to the city. However in future their Bolero, from Nottingham to Sarajevo and across the art-sport threshold, is a transgressive event that will endure long ahead and far beyond their last performance at Nottingham Arena.

Torvill and Dean: Our Last Dance takes place at Motorpoint Arena on Thursday 10, Friday 11, and Saturday 12 July.