Len Goodman – silver-tongue and twinkle toes

Len Goodman, who has sadly just died of bone cancer, is another success from unlikely beginnings story. Born into a poor London East End family who scraped a living selling vegetables off a barrow he was told by his headmaster he was never going to amount to anything – “You’re a failure in class. You’ll be a failure in life.” Leaving school early he became a welder, injured his foot at football, took up dancing on medical advice, married his dance teacher’s da