Tearful Jessie Wallace gets booted off Strictly as judges say she'd be better off on a football pitch

Actress Jessie Wallace became the latest contestant to leave Strictly Come Dancing tonight after judges said her moves would be more at home on the football field.

The combination of viewer vote and judges scores left the former EastEnders star and her partner Darren Bennett in the bottom two along with singer Heather Small and Brian Fortuna.

The couples were asked to perform a second dance and the show's judges decided Small deserved to stay.

Wallace, who played Kat Slater on the BBC soap, was the second EastEnder to leave the show, following in the footsteps of Gillian Taylforth.

After the first dance, Judge Arlene Phillips told her: 'This dance needs a sporty delivery and sometimes you got that and you looked like you were on the dance floor and other times you looked like you were on the football field. When you were doing those two kicks - it was like "help help" - that was not good.

'You have got to make sure that you are ruling your shoes and not your shoes ruling your feet.'


Head judge Len Goodman criticised her posture, saying: 'Your bosom was pushing on him and that made your bottom stick out - you've got to tuck that under and get your bosom away from Darren'.

Wallace and Bennett received just 19 points out of a possible 40.

After the dance-off, three of the judges voted for Small to stay, leaving only Goodman in disagreement.

'I thought Jessie and Darren improved the most during that performance. Both couples made mistakes, but my vote was with them,' he said.

Wallace took the defeat in good grace.

'I wish it could've been longer but that's the game,' she said. 'I've had a wicked time, Darren's brilliant.'



Meanwhile, it has emerged that Strictly Come Dancing's Cherie Lunghi married a foreign actor friend just so that he could stay in Britain.

South African Ralph Lawson said she agreed to tie the knot with him in a business arrangement to stop him being deported.

Mr Lawson, who first met Cherie when they attended drama college together, said at the weekend: 'She said if getting married was what it was going to take for me to stay in the UK, then we'd just have to do the deed. I didn't propose to her or anything like that it was a business arrangement.'

The revelation came a week after Strictly Come Dancing's Australian judge Craig Revel Horwood was exposed as living with his gay lover when he told UK immigration officials he was living with his wife to avoid being deported.

Cherie married Mr Lawson more than 30 years ago in a small ceremony attended by just two friends. She was 22 and he was four years older.

They were appearing on stage together at the time, and he had received a call from the immigration department warning him that his visa had expired and he faced being deported.

Mr Lawson, who now lives with a male friend, told the Sunday Mirror: 'We were friends but we really did love one another. I was in a tight spot and she helped me out. It may have been a wedding of convenience but we still had a proper honeymoon night together.'

The couple never lived together as man and wife, instead staying in separate houses in Newcastle.

Mr Lawson ended up moving back to South Africa two years later after being offered a new job.