Was she just too smug to win? Why Susanna Reid's growing profile may have cost her the Strictly crown

Susanna Reid appeared to be waltzing to victory but fell at the last hurdle

Strictly Come Dancing ‘is about bonding, not backstabbing.’
Contestants 'feel a whole lot of love' and always 'root for each other'. There is absolutely 'no smugness’ behind the scenes, and ‘
the intensity of the experience binds us together'.
So said Susanna Reid, a few days ago, in a gushing column for the Radio Times which paid tribute the celebrity rivals who had apparently helped make the show ‘the least competitive environment I’ve worked in'.
Hairy Biker Dave Myers had been ‘a joy to behold’, Reid declared. Dragons' Den’s Deborah Meaden was ‘sparkling’. Vanessa Feltz ‘a delight’.
While Countdown’s blonde brainbox Rachel Riley ‘shared hugs, thoughts, experiences, maths games... and glasses of Cava’ in the dressing room'.
As for actress Fiona Fullerton, her 'love of Strictly sparkled through her eyes,' we were reliably informed.
'She brought warmth, kindness and grace to the group,’ and had ‘charmed everyone’.
That was then. Today, with the fake tan fading and the last whiffs of hairspray finally receding from her nostrils, the always-bubbly Ms Reid must be wondering if she can take the last one of those saccharine tributes back.
In a remarkably candid and - let’s be honest - downright rude newspaper column, Fullerton has revealed her immense pleasure that the 43-year-old BBC Breakfast host failed to win Saturday’s Strictly final.
Reid lacked charm backstage, Fullerton carped, and had also managed to alienate fellow contestants with relentless self-promotion.
‘She approached this competition with a PR campaign driven with military precision,’ Fullerton wrote. ‘There was definitely an Obama-style use of social media and a lack of charm that left most of us bewildered.’
Fullerton, who was writing in the Daily Telegraph, added that fellow contestants, with whom she had watched the final episode of Strictly from the comfort of host Tess Daly’s dressing room, shared her barbed views.

‘Every time she entered Tess’s room there were uncomfortable mutterings,’ she claimed. ‘It seemed she’d convinced the media she was the outright winner.’
Neither Reid, nor her representatives, have yet dignified the remarks with a response.
And, it must be said, not a single one of the other 13 ‘celebrity’ dancers who have jollified our TV screens for the past three months has yet stuck their head above the parapet to back them up either.

 

Susanna Reid and partner Kevin dance to Good Morning

On paper, Reid certainly had the pedigree to win but was well beaten by Clancy in Saturday's final

Susanna Reid (pictured with partner Kevin Clifton) could have lost out on the prize after viewers stopped seeing her as the underdog, say experts

However, the level of hostility they reveal must surely go at least some way towards explaining how Reid - for weeks the bookies’ favourite to win this TV talent show - managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
In the event, it was model-turned-footballer’s wife Abbey Clancy who took the Strictly crown.
Yet hours before Saturday’s final, bookies were offering odds as tight as 6/4-on in favour of Reid, making her one of the most fancied finalists since the show’s launch a decade ago.

Scathing: Former contestant Fiona Fullerton said Reid lacked charm

‘She has been the subject of a sustained gamble in the past three weeks, and would have been our worst ever result in the show’s history [if she’d won],’ said a spokesman for William Hill.
On paper, Reid certainly had the pedigree to win. Two of Strictly’s ten previous winners - Natasha Kaplinsky and Chris Hollins - had been BBC journalists, and other TV news figures such as John Sergeant have heroically over-performed.
But in the end, she was well beaten by Clancy, in a live final watched by 12 million people.
Around six million votes were cast. Although the BBC will not provide a full breakdown of votes, sources close to the show say that although Reid beat actress Natalie Gumede into third place, the result was ‘not particularly close’.
The defeat came despite the fact that Reid was relentlessly plugged by the BBC, who allowed her to make it a staple conversation on her Breakfast show sofa. She was even granted a weekly Radio Times column.
Publicists at the national broadcaster - like all Strictly contestants she was given PR help - secured her more promotional interviews than any rival, and arranged for her to grace the covers of several magazines.
Only a few days ago, Reid used Twitter to draw the attention of her 180,000 followers (who have been fed a steady diet of Strictly commentary) to one such cover story about her.

 

It suggested her imminent success on the show would prove that ‘barriers against older women working on television have fallen away’.
In the end, though, that signal success wasn’t to be.

Although the BBC will not provide a breakdown of figures it is not thought the final between Clancy (left) and Reid (right) both pictured with their dance partners, was close

Triumph: Around 6million viewers tuned in to watch the model and partner Aljaz Skorjanec take home the coveted disco ball trophy

With a command of spin comparable to a carefully-hung glitterball, sources close to Reid are now putting her failure to win Strictly down to nothing more than her performance - good, but never quite outstanding - on the dance-floor.
In explaining her loss, they point out that judges gave her a score of 112 out of 120 for her dances on Saturday’s show — four points fewer than Clancy.
‘Sadly, she peaked at Blackpool,’ one source said, referring to an episode broadcast from the seaside town in mid-November, when she scored 39 out of 40 for an effervescent Paso Doble with partner Kevin Clifton.
That theory ignores one salient fact, however: ever since Strictly Come Dancing first graced the nation’s TV screens, it has always been as much about a celebrity’s popularity as their ability to execute a flawless cha-cha.
Indeed, if the show really was about dancing, then Gumede, who scored 119 out of 120 (Clancy got 116), would have won the final fairly easily.
But try as she undoubtedly might, Susanna Reid has never quite managed to capture the public affection.

Though Reid (far right) had been a favourite to win, bookies revealed their earnings would have been the worst in the show's history if she had won the all female final (pictured)

To viewers in the North of England, who make up a disproportionate number of Strictly voters, her privileged upbringing - Reid’s alma mater is £30,000-a-year St Paul’s Girls’ School in West London - and cut glass accent are enough to damn her as, to quote one typical comment on an online message board, a ‘posh southerner’.
To others, something about her (perhaps unfairly) smacks of smugness.
On paper, Reid is a sort of super-mum - who lives with long-term partner, ex-BBC sports producer Dominic Cotton in Balham, South London, commutes three times a week to BBC headquarters in Salford, and still manages to collect her three sons from school regularly.
She is also a hugely accomplished TV host, with two decades of experience, who is one of the central figures in a breakfast TV show which regularly trounces its rivals in the ratings.

The journalist has more than two decades of experience in broadcasting

Yet type her name into YouTube, and you’ll be presented with endless clips in which ungallant viewers highlight cleavage-revealing tops, or repeat, in slow-motion, the two occasions in recent months when she has accidentally exposed her knickers (cream and zebra print, in case you are wondering) to camera.
Other critics have accused her of being too flirtatious with male interviewees, such as Hugh Grant and Alex Turner, the lead singer of the Arctic Monkeys.
Indeed, so widespread are the noisy critics that would-be Tory MEP Deborah Dunleavy - forced to apologise last week for tweeting ‘does anyone else just want to slap Susanna Reid?’ - may have been giving voice to what some viewers were quietly thinking.
There are certainly plenty of readers who despair at the gushing nature of, for example, her weekly Radio Times column.
‘The end is in sight. And my eyes fill with tears as I write,’ it began this week. ‘My sequined rocket to the helium-rich Planet Strictly is in its final descent back to Planet Reality.’
One Radio Times reader responded to a different recent column commenting, sarcastically: ‘Let’s do something interesting, and talk about me.’
There are also plenty of viewers who detect, in the full-frontal nature of Reid’s assault on Strictly, a whiff of barely-concealed ambition, and over-competitiveness.
One TV critic recently branded her ‘a kind of dance Terminator who became so determined to win that she visibly gurned during the results,’ adding that she ‘began to resemble a fully-fledged, hot-knickered handful of hormones’.
Publicists meanwhile wonder if Reid suffered from over-exposure. ‘I think Susanna’s problem was that she was no longer regarded as the underdog,’ says James Harvey, of celebrity PR firm The Outside Organisation.
In other words, as Strictly’s result - and Fiona Fullerton’s recent comments - have shown, Reid’s growing profile may have come at a cost.