Dancing On Ice 2010: profile of Jeremy Sheffield
JEREMY SHEFFIELD
AGE: 43
OCCUPATION: ACTOR
SKATING PARTNER: SUSIE LIPANOVA
“Of course in my mind I am still 20 years old at the height of fitness and think I can do everything. And then suddenly I rip a hamstring and it's quite clear I'm not!”
He won a place at the Royal Ballet School when he was 10 and by the age of 17 he'd joined the Royal Ballet where he remained until he turned to acting a decade later. But even a background in dance couldn't prepare Jeremy Sheffield for the sheer frustration of learning how to figure skate.
'It's horrible, it's so frustrating!' he says, laughing. 'The first time I went on the ice I was all over the place and even managed to fall flat on my face when I met Torvill & Dean. How much more embarrassing can it get? And that was in front of the cameras too: I could tell the producers were rejoicing going: 'Yippee, the first person has already fallen over and made a fool of himself.'
'I think for me the most difficult thing about learning to ice skate has to be the frustration. Obviously I haven't danced for ten years and I'm sure if I tried to do classical ballet now I'd make a fool of myself and be awful as well. In my mind I can feel how ballet should be and it's the same with skating, but skating is just a lot more difficult to get right because you are flailing around on the ice and barely able to stand up.
'Dancing is the thing I know best in the world so I have a picture in my mind of each routine but then I get up and try it on the ice and it's a million miles away from what it should look like which is a horrible feeling really. I know what I want to do, I know how it should look, but I just cannot make it happen which is so frustrating.'
The former Holby medic quit ballet aged 27 after a series of injuries. Similarly, injury nearly forced him to pull out of Dancing On Ice only with only weeks to go before the live shows.
'Basically I was stretching and joking around with my partner Susie and then bang, my hamstring went. That wasn't too bad because I've done that before, what I then did which was so stupid was to carry on. The next day I trained for two hours and by the end of that session I was trying to do quite a simple move and obviously not being very good I was off balance and tired and all of a sudden all the muscles came into play and it just felt like something had exploded in my leg. It was a sharp tear in my hamstring and very painful indeed.
'As a ballet dancer you spend half your career injured, so I could tell it was something serious. But luckily muscles heal themselves relatively quickly and I was back on the ice about two weeks later. But it was very frustrating time and I felt quite miserable not knowing if I'd have to drop out completely because I'd been so looking forward to the whole experience.
'While there are lots of aspects of the dancing world that I don't miss at all, I did miss that sense of fitness and attention to detail that you have in ballet. I do things like yoga but I'm actually a bit lazy and unless someone makes me go to classes I only go once a month. So this seemed like a great opportunity to get back to that world of hard physical training and graft. Of course in my mind I am still 20 years old at the height of fitness and think I can do everything. And then suddenly I rip a hamstring and it's quite clear I'm not!'
A self-confessed perfectionist, Jeremy says his progress on the ice is all thanks to the patience and skill of his skating partner, Susie. He explains:
'Susie is great because she's started doing this thing when I'm working myself up into a frenzy and there's lots of cursing and stamping of feet going on. Basically she does this thing where she just walks off the ice and goes and gets a cup of tea. That's just the sort of pragmatic person I need because it stops me in my tracks from acting like a petulant child. She says she wouldn't put up with that kind of behaviour from her five year old son so she's not going to put up with it from me!'
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