Comedian/writer Katy Brand has written a new book. I Carried A Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me (published today, 10th October) is part memoir, part homage to the classic film, Dirty Dancing - one of top ten most-watched films in the UK on Netflix this September.
The book explores how her teenage obsession with the film has impacted Katy’s life in the most unexpected of ways, informing her class politics, her relationship with her father, her attitudes to romance and more. In this extract below she writes about the time she did some dancing herself in aid of Sport Relief...
I Carried A Watermelon: Dirty Dancing and Me by Katy Brand is published by HQ, HarperCollins in ebook, audiobook and ebook. Buy here.
7.30pm, 13 March 2010.
The show is Let’s Dance for Sport Relief and it’s going out live to an audience of 8 million people.
I am stood on the world’s shiniest floor, behind two large sliding black doors, beyond which are nine TV cameras, a live studio audience, a panel of judges, presenters Mel and Sue and my new fiancé.
Thirty seconds to performance.
I am wearing a black leotard, a glove made of shards of mirrored glass, three pairs of tights, a pair of strappy heels and a lot of gold body make-up.
Twenty seconds to performance.
I can hear Mel and Sue begin my introduction. Standing in front of me are two professional dancers, wearing the same leotard as me, minus the glove, each with about 70 per cent less thigh than I have.
Ten seconds to performance.
I can hear the end of the video clips package. I am shaking uncontrollably. It’s fear, yes, but also adrenaline. More adrenaline than I have ever felt running through my body in my entire life. I wonder if this much adrenaline is actually safe. I wonder if I might need a paramedic.
Five seconds to performance.
They are saying my name. The music starts. The doors start to slide back. And I can see only bright lights as we move forward in line. I’m supposed to be strutting sassily, but I can barely walk because I’m shaking so much. Am I dying? Possibly. But it’s too late to stop now.
Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ starts playing and the rest is noise. Blur and noise. Oh god. I still feel sick now, and I’m only writing it down.
At the time of writing, the YouTube video of me performing the ‘Single Ladies’ dance has nearly 40 million hits. Every year, a TV company in Japan enquires about my availability to perform on Japanese national TV, competing against their leading Beyoncé impersonator.
Every year, I say yes, and then ask for a fee so ludicrous that I never hear from them again. Until the following year, when a fresh enquiry is made. They truly believe that doing the ‘Single Ladies’ dance is my main occupation. They think I am the UK’s leading Beyoncé impersonator, and therefore a worthy opponent for their own home-grown Queen B. And with YouTube numbers like that, who can blame them? They do not know that between then and now I have lived through a somewhat gritty labour, and giving birth to a baby with an unusually large head has left me rather less able to slut drop suddenly or convincingly.
The ‘Single Ladies’ dance is still usually the first thing anyone says about me on introductions to panel shows, live events, and other appearances on TV, radio and the stage. And I don’t even mind. My greatest triumph was expressed through the medium of dance, and I sort of love that. And it was a really fucking difficult dance at that. I’m not going to lie – it nearly killed me. We had five days of rehearsal: that was the rule. Everyone in the competition was only allowed five days of rehearsal, no matter what dance they were doing. Which is both fair and not fair at the same time. I turned up to the rehearsal room on the morning of day one feeling nervous, but certain that the choreographer and two professional dancers would have the whole routine worked out, and they would simply teach it to me. It would be tough – I wasn’t really fit enough to do it justice. But it was a comedy show, and so long as I learned the basic steps and messed about a bit in the middle, we would be fine. We had loads of time . . .
I walked in to see three people in tracksuits crowded round a laptop, watching a YouTube video with the kind of intense concentration I imagine is normally reserved for moon landings. I wandered over and introduced myself. They looked up and smiled, and at that point I clocked that they were in fact watching the official video of Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’. On YouTube. Like anyone can. ‘Oh hi,’ said the choreographer. ‘We were just trying to figure out the dance. . . it’s incredibly complicated, isn’t it?’ Oh shit. Yes, it is incredibly complicated. I knew this because I had also been watching the official video on YouTube at home, and had, until this point, been relieved that someone else would have already figured it out and would simply teach it to me.
‘Come and have a look and see if you can work out this step here,’ he said.
‘Which step?’ I said.
‘The first one.’
Shit, shit, shit.
We were already 20 minutes into day one – Monday. I would dance this for the first and possibly the last time ON SATURDAY. I thought about simply running away. Literally, just running out of the room and not coming back. There was no way I could learn this dance in five days if my teachers didn’t know it either. But instead, I laughed jauntily to cover my panic (a frequent tactic of mine) and bent over the laptop to have a look.
Well, we did it, somehow. The dancers – Steph and Stefanie – were amazing. We practised for hours and hours. My fiancé had to rub my legs every night, and I was so sore I could only go up or downstairs sideways, like a giant crab. But we did it. And now almost 40 million people have watched it. It’s my most popular piece of work by about 39.99999 million hits. Those three minutes of film may outlast every other thing I ever do. It might even outlast me. So I am a dancer. I must be. There’s simply no other explanation. I am the Florence Foster Jenkins of the dance world – they can say I didn’t dance well, but they can’t say I didn’t dance.
Watch Katy Brand do Beyoncé below.
