Jaime Winstone called the first dance off of 2026 on Strictly Come Dancing a “horrific” experience after she and Carlos Gu were saved on Sunday 4 October. The result mattered because the pair had sat in the middle of the leaderboard on 21 points for both of their opening dances, yet still landed in the bottom two.
On Tuesday 6 October, on It Takes Two, Winstone said, “It is a horrific feeling being up there.” She added that the past 24 hours had been “really emotional,” and said, “I am not used to being so vulnerable on camera…” The reaction was plain: one week’s scoring cushion did not stop the vote and judges from putting them under pressure fast.
Ray Winstone and the bottom two
Ray Winstone’s daughter also said the experience took her back to being a child in school and feeling that she did not fit in. Her line, “Yes, a lot of insecurities happened yesterday. But you know what? It is not how you fall, it’s how you get yourself up again,” turned the dance-off into a reset rather than a dead end. For viewers, that is the practical story here: surviving the first cut does not erase the hit, but it does buy another routine.
Winstone and Carlos Gu were judged against Chris Appleton and Amy Dowden, and the panel unanimously chose to save Winstone and Gu. That left Appleton and Dowden out, with Dowden saying she was “gutted” to be the first dancer eliminated from the competition for the second year in a row.
Carlos Gu after three years
Gu said, “my heart was broken,” then explained, “You only become stronger because you have been through those challenging positions.” His response carried extra weight because he had not been in a dance off for three years, after winning last year’s series with Karen Carney and spending 2024 without a celebrity partner. The contrast is sharp: a former winner can still end up fighting for survival early when scores sit at 21 and the public vote pulls differently from the judges’ ranking.
Dowden’s exit also closed a loop from her own run of setbacks, after she rejoined Strictly Come Dancing in 2024 following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2022 and later withdrew mid-series that year because of a stress fracture in her foot. On this evidence, the story of the week is not just who stayed in, but how quickly a middle-of-the-table position can become a danger zone once the vote narrows the field.
