Emma Wilkinson and her partner Scott Irons won the 2026 Strictly Tanglewood Dancing competition for the first time last Monday – and by a massive margin.
There were seven couples – all pictured below – who took part and did their dance in front of four judges. Each judge talked about each performance before giving a score. By the time thew last couple had danced Emma & Scott were in first place, Karen & Kevin were 2nd with Debbie & Paul and Kavitha & Syed in joint third.
However, there was an audience vote. Four people from the audience had been selected to write down their own score for each couple. their votes were collected during a refreshment break the audience vote was revealed = it left Emma and Scott still in first place but there was two couples, Debbie & Paul and Karen & Kevin, in joint second.
A Dance-off had to take place and those two couples danced again. The four judges were then asked to select a couple they thought should be the runner's-up. It was very close, the two couples still couldn't be separated and it was left to head judge John to make the difficult decision, which was to place Karen & Kevin as the runner's-up.
There was never any doubt about who the champions were, by a margin of 6pts it was Emma and Scott. All the prizes were presented by our special invited guest's Kantha and Denise – Kantha is the mother of club member Chirag Kunverji who sadly died in 2021 aged just 31. Denise is Kantha's neighbour and she very kindly gave a donation to Tanglewood so we could purchase two lovely trophies for our Strictly nights in memory of the very popular Chirag who won this event in 2018 and 2019
Emma was actually a runner up in the inaugural Strictly event in 2010 and again in 2019
It was a great evening and I must give enormous thanks to club helpers Jackie and Jane for organising the whole event, including several weeks of rehearsals. The full results will; be published in our April/May magazine on April 13th
