Chris McCausland has claimed the Strictly Come Dancing Glitterball trophy after impressing viewers at home. Away from the dancefloor, the comedian is happily married to ‘polar opposite’ wife Patricia

Chris McCausland has been crowned winner of Strictly Come Dancing 2024 alongside professional dance partner Dianne Buswell.

The blind comedian, 47 burst into tears as they were declared this year’s winners following a nail-biting final of the BBC competition. Their fellow finalists – Sarah Hadland and Vito Coppola, JB Gill and Lauren Oakley, and Tasha Ghouri and Aljaž Škorjanec – rallied around them as a shocked Chris hugged Dianne tightly.

He will no doubt be continuing the celebrations away from the dancefloor with his family: his Brazilian wife Patricia and their 11-year-old daughter. The couple met in 2005 when CBeebies Me Too! star Chris was performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and Patricia was filming a documentary there.

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Image:
BBC/Guy Levy)
“We spent a lot of time together when the camera wasn’t running, socialising, going out and doing things, and we just had a lot of fun,” he previously explained. The star said his wife was “full of energy” and “took me out of my comfort zone”, while he made her laugh and was “almost this calming presence in her life that she was attracted to”.

But Chris affectionately says his wife Patricia, who is from Brazil, brings “chaos” into their relationship. “We were very opposite,” he told Gyles Brandreth on his podcast Rosebud.

“She comes across as very British but she’s Brazilian, she came across when she was five or six. Her life is chaos in the way that Brazilian people are chaos. It’s a natural attribute of their being that they are very proud of – they bring chaos to any room.

“The number of times she’ll be talking in Portuguese to her mum and then I’ll say to her: ‘Are you okay? What happened there?’ It sounds like they had the most horrific argument and they’re just talking about what they’re going to do that day.”

He has been married to Patricia for 12 years with an 11-year-old daughter called Sophie. The rarely seen youngster made an appearance on Comedians: Home Alone back in 2020, which showed her sitting with her dad at a kitchen table. Sophie is laughing at something Chris says, with the star looking relaxed in a blue t-shirt.

But the possibility of becoming a parent “terrified” him. “I was in such a dilemma about it because I knew I would regret not having kids but the thought of having kids terrified me,” he told Gyles Brandreth in an interview. “The idea of being a parent and all of the things I was going to be unable to do properly.

“My dad, all the things he used to do with me as a kid, taking me to different places, and the time he put in helping me build things. You go “how am I going to be able to do those things – I’m not going to be a proper dad, I’m going to be a half dad’.”

Back to Chris and Patricia, the star revealed they have very different ideas when it comes to heating their home. “As you can imagine, we are very different in terms of our culture and our biological response to temperature,” he joked. “While my wife still needs a winter coat in 22-degree sunshine, I find it hard to cope in temperatures above about 26.

“I believe there’s a high likelihood that one of us might be discovered lifeless in the hallway one day, reaching out towards the thermostat, while the other has fled the country.”