‘We’ll dance together again’: An emotional exit for Strictly’s Ellie Goldstein

After making history as the first person with Down’s syndrome to be a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing, Ellie Goldstein was tonight the fifth celebrity to be voted off the 2025 series. The model and actress took on EastEnders star Balvinder Sopal in the dance-off to cap off a raucous Hallowe’en Week that will go down in the Strictly annals as one of the best ever – largely thanks to Lewis Cope and Katya Jones’s spectacular couple’s choice, which scored the first perfect 40 of the series. Judge Anton Du Beke described it as the best he’d ever seen on the show.

Goldstein has been a joyous presence throughout the series, bringing unalloyed enthusiasm and no little attitude to every dance she performed. Her friendship with professional dancer Vito Coppola has given the show the sort of warmth and depth that felt sorely lacking a few weeks ago, when the show added the controversial Apprentice star Thomas Skinner to its growing list of headaches. While Goldstein was not the first person with Down’s syndrome to be on any version of the show – CBeebies presenter George Webster took part in the 2022 Christmas special –  she was the first to take part in the regular series. BBC producers will look upon her inclusion as an uncomplicated good-news story. And those have been rare in the Strictly corridors of late.

While Goldstein was unlikely to make it as far as the final, it was still something of a surprise to find her in the Week 6 dance-off. It was presumed she enjoyed enormous popular support among the viewers. Less of a surprise was the presence of Sopal, who competed in her third dance-off in four weeks. While Goldstein looked crushed when Tess Daly announced she and Coppola were in the bottom two, Sopal took the news with a resigned laugh. She performed her rumba like a woman who was past caring.

Sopal, who has scored only sevens in the past three weeks, looks on borrowed time, though Gladiators star Harry Aikines-Aryeetey will be breathing a sigh of relief after coming bottom of the leaderboard. Amber Davies, the Love Island winner and West End star who has attracted criticism for her prior dancing experience, could not hold back the tears when Claudia Winkleman asked if she was relieved not to be in a second successive dance-off.

The emotion in the studio was palpable when the judges, with some solemnity, voted off Goldstein and Coppola. The series will be poorer without the presence of “Team Cheeky”, though Coppola has scored an enormous PR win for the show by proving that some of the male pros are thoroughly decent people. It was touching to watch him talk Goldstein through the disappointment of being in the dance-off and the blow of being voted off by all four judges, and his bond with his partner, his “little sister”, has felt genuine from the off. “We’ll dance together again”, he told her at the end.