As a documentary maker Stacey Dooley has found herself in some dangerous and compromising positions, but she admits nothing could have prepared her for the realities of parenthood.
The former Strictly Come Dancing winner, 36, shares daughter Minnie with professional dancer Kevin Clifton, 41, whom she was paired with for the BBC dance competition back in 2018.
Having recently celebrated their daughter’s first birthday, Dooley will attest that there’s a reason why sleep deprivation has been used for centuries as a form of torture.
Speaking to the Standard in partnership with EE Learn Live, she explained: “I hadn’t anticipated the sleep deprivation, I found that very tricky. The first few months I felt like I was living on another planet. I could not believe how exhausted I was.”
The pay off however was “overwhelming love”.
“She’s just a great leveller,” Dooley said of Minnie.
“I think a lot of my identity was wrapped up in what I did for a living before Minnie came along and now priorities totally shift and there’s someone so much more important than everyone and everything else.”
She added: “She’s great, she’s a dream; a little showstopper.”
Last month Dooley hosted EE Learning Live in London, an inaugural festival of learning designed to empower and inspire secondary school children.
Asked about what her hopes are for her daughter as she grows up, she said: “I think your main objective is that they are kind, confident, happy and healthy.
“I love the idea of her finding out who she is and I think temptation can be you try and mould them into a mini you, but you really want them to kind of find out who they are, what makes them tick and whatever she is passionate about and go on that journey with them.
“I don’t know if she will dance [like Kevin], she’s got rhythm! She only has a couple of moves though so she might need to widen her repertoire,” she continued.
“I can’t imagine her being like a stagey kid, but I might be wrong. She just needs to find whatever she’s into. She might want to be a pastry chef and then suddenly we’ll be reading all of the books on that – you just don’t know what’s going to excite them.”
Minnie’s current passion is Peppa Pig, which Dooley and Clifton recently took her to see at the cinema and says the youngster seemed in her element.
“Kevin and I are both lucky that we’re self-employed so we’re able to select gigs that suit, and it means that one of us is always with her. I recognise that that’s a really privileged position to sort of be in.
“I’ve been lucky as well that I’ve been able to take her with me so I’ve never had to be away from her but I think that was circumstance as well because for the first year she was on the boob.
“So if I had to go to work, she had to come with me. A highlight was when I was filming in America and Kev and Minnie were with me just down the road and we had to hire a trailer and they had to live in a trailer nearby.
“Juggling filming in a brothel and breastfeeding a six or seven-month-old was new territory.”
