Debbie McGee has shown off her flexibility by doing the splits live on air as she appeared on Good Morning Britain.
The 63-year-old TV star was discussing her skills while on the morning programme when the presenting panel recalled her dancing ability which she demonstrated while competing on Strictly Come Dancing in 2017.
The show’s presenters Ed Balls and Susanna Reid, also former Strictly contestants, admitted they could not do the splits but urged McGee to show off her talent.
McGee noted that she had not warmed up but agreed to do them, recalling how her Strictly dance partner Giovanni Pernice had nicknamed her ‘flexi-Mcgee’.
She'll forever be flexi-Mcgee 😮@thedebbiemcgee putting us to shame this morning!👏 pic.twitter.com/s8196Z0wyq
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 31, 2022
Balls admitted he did not think she would do them when he asked, but the TV star said she had wanted to cheer people up as there had been a lot of “upsetting stuff in the news this morning”.
McGee was a finalist during the dance competition’s fifteenth series and was the winner of the 2019 Christmas special.
The TV star first rose to fame as the assistant of magician Paul Daniels, who she was later married to for 28 years before he died of a brain tumour at the age of 77 in March 2016.
She is now making her stage acting debut in The House On Cold Hill, which is an adaptation of the Peter James book about a haunted house that will play at The Mill at Sonning Theatre from February 3.
McGee will portray a “wacky medium” who runs a crystals shop and gets involved in a house that a young couple has moved into when she earns some extra money as their a cleaner, and starts to “feel things”.
She said that she had seen the play at Richmond Theatre threes years ago and had felt “really affected” by it and then six months later she got a call asking her to read for the part.
McGee admitted that she was not a “believer” in clairvoyance, saying: “I can’t have lived with a magician for 38 years and believe in things like that. So I’m really having to act.”
However, she said she still occasionally talks to loved ones who have died, including her father and her husband.
“I think when you’ve had somebody in your life for that long, and I still feel it about my father, that they become a part of you, is what I feel. You do feel like they’re still there”, she explained.
She added: “Sometimes I suddenly will need an answer to something and I’ll think: ‘Paul, what would you have done?’ And then it comes to me.
“But I don’t believe that it’s him telling me, I just think they are so much a part of you that your brain thinks like they would.”