The Strictly 2026 New Hosts Passed Their First Test With 5.8 Million Viewers. The Real One Is Live on Saturday
Replacing the faces of your biggest show is the thing every broadcaster dreads, and the BBC has just done it on Strictly without losing the room. Saturday’s launch peaked at 5.8 million, 200,000 up on last year, with the Strictly 2026 new hosts Emma Willis, Josh Widdicombe and Johannes Radebe fronting the first series since 2004 without Tess Daly or Claudia Winkleman anywhere near the ballroom. That’s a better result than anyone at the BBC would have admitted to hoping for back in May, when the trio was announced to a chorus of “three? really?”.
In This Article
- What the Strictly 2026 new hosts actually did on Saturday night
- 5.8 million is a better number than it looks
- Three hosts is a hedge. One of them is the point.
- The "weak line-up" complaint gets Strictly backwards
- The sparkle has a cost, and some of it was settled over Zoom
- Saturday 26 September at 6.15pm is the real test
It’s also a pre-recorded result. The launch show is a soft opening: taped in advance, tidied in the edit, safe. The first live show goes out at 6.15pm on Saturday 26 September, and that’s when we find out whether three presenters can run a live two-hour broadcast without treading on each other’s lines.
What the Strictly 2026 new hosts actually did on Saturday night
They danced, for a start. The show opened with a group number that put the pros, the judges and all three new hosts on the floor together, which is a sharper statement of intent than any press release. Willis said afterwards she’d never imagined dancing with Strictly pros. Radebe, who’s been one of those pros since 2018, said he never thought it would be the three of them standing there. Widdicombe got a laugh he hadn’t planned for by admitting that not many people expected the three of them either, then noting the audience agreed a bit too readily.
The bigger structural change is that the old split has gone. For more than a decade the format was fixed: one host on the ballroom floor, one upstairs with the couples and the scores. The new trio rotate through the roles across a show, so nobody owns the floor and nobody owns the balcony. On the launch it worked because there wasn’t much to do. Live, with fifteen couples, four judges and a running order that changes when someone forgets their steps, it’s a different job.
The pairing reveal was overhauled too. Instead of the long, slow walk-down where each celebrity finds out who they’ve drawn, the couples were formed inside three group routines, with partners swapping until a couple was called. Emine Saner in the Guardian likened it to speed-dating and reckoned it was only marginally less dull than the old way. I’d go further than that: it was the first launch show in years I didn’t fast-forward, mostly because the celebrities had to dance before they’d been introduced, which is far more revealing than a VT of them saying they’re “so nervous”.
And the logo’s changed. First time since series eight, back in 2010. It’s a small thing, but the BBC doesn’t touch that glitterball lightly.
5.8 million is a better number than it looks
The headline figure is the peak. According to the BBC’s overnight figures reported by PA, the average was 5.3 million, on a 49.2% share of everyone watching television at that point on Saturday evening. That share is 7% higher than last year’s launch. The BBC also pointed out the show pulled more than four million viewers ahead of anything else on at the same time, and by Sunday morning it was sitting at number one on iPlayer’s most-popular chart.
Context matters here. Strictly has been leaking linear viewers for years, like every other big-tent show in Britain; the 2024 series’ first live show was reported at the time as the lowest in the programme’s history. So holding flat through a full host change, with the peak actually up, is a decent night’s work. The share figure is the one to watch. When the total number of people sitting in front of a telly on a Saturday shrinks every year, taking a bigger slice of a smaller pie is the only kind of growth left.
Compare it with what ITV’s been through this month. Big Brother came back with an axed live feed and an influencer mole and is fighting for a fraction of Strictly’s audience, and the same channel’s final Up film was a landmark that most of the country still didn’t watch. Strictly is the one remaining fixture where the linear number is still worth reporting in the same breath as the streaming one.
Whether it’s still worth the BBC’s money is a question for the licence fee review. On Saturday nights, it plainly is.
Three hosts is a hedge. One of them is the point.
My problem with the trio isn’t the people. It’s that three is the number you land on when you can’t choose.
Remember how this started. Daly and Winkleman announced in October 2025, mid-series, that they’d leave together after the final. Winkleman’s line was that the show deserved something new and that they wanted to go out on a high, which is the classiest possible way of saying the two of them could see the ratings graph as clearly as anyone. They’d both been there since 2004. The BBC had eleven months to find a replacement for the most secure double act in British light entertainment, and what it did with those months is instructive.
The BBC ran auditions and chemistry tests through the spring. Zoe Ball has said openly that she went for it and lost, describing working through the stages of rejection and grief in the way only Zoe Ball can. Rylan and Sara Cox both confirmed screen tests. Fleur East, who’d been fronting It Takes Two, said she was “kind of bothered” not to be considered. That’s a lot of very capable people to pass over, and the answer the BBC arrived at wasn’t one of them but three others, which tells you the corporation was more worried about a single point of failure than about a crowded stage.
Willis is the safe bet, and there’s nothing wrong with safe on a Saturday. She’s fronted live television for the best part of two decades, from Big Brother to The Voice, and she has the Radio 2 slot that makes her a BBC face already. Saner called her “a class act” in the Guardian, and that’s about right. Widdicombe is the comic relief, and he’s at his best when he’s given room to gently rib a contestant rather than hurry through a link. On the launch he looked like a man who’d been told not to do too much comedy and was itching to ignore the note.
But Radebe is the one that matters. He’s the first professional to cross from the dance floor to the host’s mark, and it changes what the presenting team can do. Tess and Claudia were warm and quick, but neither could tell you why a foxtrot had gone wrong. Radebe can, and he can do it kindly, which on this show is the trick. If the BBC decides after this series that two is plenty, he’s the one who stays. I’d put money on it.
The Guardian’s review wasn’t sure the show needs three. Neither am I. But it does need him.
The “weak line-up” complaint gets Strictly backwards
Every September the same column gets written: the celebrities are less famous than the professionals. Saner wrote a version of it this year, calling the line-up pitiful and pointing out that Will Best’s Big Brother is the ITV one rather than the Channel 4 one people actually remember. It’s a funny observation. It’s also a lazy way to judge this show.
Strictly doesn’t need stars. It makes them. Rose Ayling-Ellis was a soap actress most of the country couldn’t have picked out before she won in 2021. Hamza Yassin was a wildlife cameraman. The series that get remembered are the ones where somebody nobody expected turns into the story by week five, and that only happens when the line-up isn’t stuffed with people who already have a public.
Look at who’s actually here. Dame Sarah Storey, Britain’s most decorated Paralympian, dancing with Julian Caillon. Shaun Wright-Phillips with Alexis Warr, the first England footballer in a while who might be able to move. Jaime Winstone with Carlos Gu, who won last year with Karen Carney and is the obvious early favourite. Lacey Turner from EastEnders with Vito Coppola. Melanie Walters from Gavin & Stacey with Aljaž Škorjanec. Delta Goodrem, an international booking, with Kai Widdrington. Dani Dyer is back with Nikita Kuzmin after fracturing her ankle before the first week last year, which is the kind of second-chance arc this show eats up.
The rest are the wildcards: Chris Appleton the celebrity hairdresser, Graeme Hall the television dog trainer, Tabby Stoecker the Olympic skeleton racer, Emmerdale’s Lawrence Robb, social media presenter John Nellis and Love Island winner Cach Mercer, who’s been paired with new pro Maddie Ingoldsby. My mate who claims never to watch Strictly had opinions about the dog trainer within ten minutes. That’s the line-up doing its job.
The pairing that matters most is Bethany Antonia and Nancy Xu, the show’s third all-female couple after Nicola Adams and Katya Jones in 2020 and Jayde Adams and Karen Hauer in 2022. Antonia, who plays Baela in House of the Dragon, told the room that watching Adams dance with Jones was a big part of her own coming out. On a show that gets accused of being repetitive, that was a moment that couldn’t have happened in any other year.
The sparkle has a cost, and some of it was settled over Zoom
The revamp is a clear-out, not a lick of paint. Five professionals left between March and April. Karen Hauer went after fourteen years, the longest-serving woman on the show. Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk and Gorka Márquez followed. Michelle Tsiakkas, who joined in 2022, said she was told over a Zoom call that her contract wasn’t being renewed and that her “dream was shattered”. She pulled out of the professionals’ tour.
Five new pros came in: Aleksandra Isaeva, Maddie Ingoldsby, Mark Karmalita, Lethabo Monametsi and Cristian Priori. Four professionals went home from the launch without a celebrity partner, Neil Jones among them, which tells you how thin the margin is even for the people who survived the cull.
It Takes Two has been reset too. Ellie Taylor, a series 20 contestant, replaces Fleur East and Janette Manrara on the weekday spin-off. So the show that fronts the ballroom, the show that follows it on BBC Two, the logo, the pairing format and a third of the professional roster have all changed in one summer. Add the two years of headlines about conduct behind the scenes that preceded all this, and you can see why the BBC wanted the launch to feel like a fresh start rather than a continuation.
Hold both thoughts at once. The show looked joyful on Saturday. Some of the people who made it joyful for the last decade found out on a video call that they weren’t coming back.
None of that is on the new hosts, to be clear. Willis, Widdicombe and Radebe inherited the clear-out; they didn’t order it. But they’re the faces of it now, and the goodwill the launch generated has to carry the show past the part of the audience that’s still cross about Karen Hauer.
Saturday 26 September at 6.15pm is the real test
Everything above was recorded, cut and cleared before it went out. From this weekend it’s live, for thirteen weeks, with a results show on Sundays and a final in December. That’s the job the three of them were actually hired for.
Four things I’ll be watching. Whether the rotating roles survive contact with a live running order, or whether by week three Willis has quietly become the floor host and the other two have found fixed spots. Whether Widdicombe is allowed to be funny when a judge’s score lands badly, which is the moment Claudia used to own. Whether Radebe stays a presenter or slides back into being a pro who talks. And whether the judges, who are unchanged (Shirley Ballas, Craig Revel Horwood, Motsi Mabuse and Anton Du Beke all return), start to feel like the old guard on a set that’s been rebuilt around them.
There’s an external pressure too. The Guardian’s review pointed out that Celebrity Traitors is back on the BBC in a few weeks, and that show’s cast will make Strictly’s look thin by comparison. The corporation now has two enormous autumn formats competing for the same Saturday-night conversation, and only one of them has just changed its presenters. If you want a sense of how much the autumn schedule has shifted, our box set guide and the piece on that Netflix-versus-BBC headline are both worth ten minutes.
The launch was a good soft opening. Good enough that the BBC’s real gamble, the one it took in May when it chose three unproven presenters over a queue of proven ones, is now a live question rather than a hypothetical one. If the corporation does decide next spring that it can get by with two, which of the three would you keep?
