STRICTLY’S husband and wife team Aljaž Škorjanec and Janette Manrara are back on tour with their new show Remembering the Movies which visits Dorset next month.

This week we had a chance to get up close and personal with the pair to find out what it’s really like working together as man and wife...

“We both joined Strictly in 2013,’ says Janette, 35, “and it changed our lives completely – and 150 per cent for the better. Up until then, our careers were in a sort of limbo. So to get to do the best TV show in the UK with my boyfriend and then fiancé and now husband… well, it doesn’t get much better.”

But it means they’re living and working together 24/7. Doesn’t Aljaž sometimes get on her nerves? She laughs happily. “Absolutely not. He makes me smile all the time. And we were friends first which I think is important.” Aljaž, 28, can’t stay silent a moment longer. “It took me a year,” he says, “to persuade her to go out on a date.”

Does either of them experience even a tinge of jealousy when they see their other half wrapped around someone else on the dance floor? “No,” says Aljaž, “because, in the end, any passion is manufactured. Dancing is acting. It’s telling a story with conviction. But it’s not real.”

Janette is nodding furiously. “Funnily enough, Gemma Atkinson and I were talking about this when she was Aljaž’s partner in 2017. She asked me if it was all right to look into his eyes. I told her she must because otherwise how could she convincingly put across a Paso Doble, for instance?”

So, the Strictly Curse is a nonsense? “I always say that, for me and Aljaž, Strictly is a blessing. And so many other strong relationships have come out of Strictly. Look at Gorka and Gemma. Look at Rachel Riley and Pasha. Why focus on the negatives?”

Aljaž is in full agreement. “If your relationship at home is secure,” he says, “you have nothing to worry about.” It also annoys him that all the professionalism and hard work that go into perfecting a dance routine can be overshadowed by superficial speculation on a particular couple’s relationship away from the dance floor.

Each comes from a close-knit family. Aljaž’s is small and Janette’s, she says, is “a huge Cuban army”. The expectation then is that one day they’d like a family of their own. “We talk about it all the time,” says Janette. “And the right time will come along soon enough.”

But Janette is the one who’ll have to hang up her dancing shoes for a few months. How does she feel about that? “Obviously, I’ll have to take some time off. But I’m very fit so I hope I’d be able to bounce back quickly. I can never imagine retiring completely from the world of dance. I’m too passionate about it and Strictly is such an incredible platform so we’d be mad not to embrace every opportunity that comes our way. We’re already talking about professional plans for 2020.”

But for now all their considerable powers of concentration will be focused on Remembering The Movies tour. “The movies week on Strictly is one of my favourites,” says Janette. “And the lovely thing,” adds Aljaž, “is that, if it’s the success we’re sure it’s going to be, we can do it again the following year and feature a whole range of different films. This one could run and run.”

Remembering The Movies is at the Pavilion Theatre in Bournemouth on Friday, April 19.