Bill Bailey’s moves have put our dad dancing to shame

With his moonwalking days behind him, Will Gore needs to up his game if he wants to embarrass his children on the dance floor

Saturday night fever: Oti Mabuse and Bailey are a must-see combo (PA)

There are any number of ways for a parent to embarrass their children. All that’s really required is to wait until they become teenagers, then simply exist. Your mere living, breathing presence will almost certainly drive them to paroxysms of mortified rage.

It’s possible to get ahead of the game though, by focussing on some of the key humiliation activities. Most obviously, you can try to make jokey small talk with your kids’ friends: a sure-fire way to reach the “you’re dead to me” nirvana. Alternatively, question your children loudly and in public about a range of important matters, such as whether they remembered to put on a vest.

And then of course there is dancing.

It’s just about possible I have never seen my own parents get down and boogie. It’s also quite conceivable that I’ve simply blocked it from my memory, so haunting would the spectacle have surely been. I reckon my dad could give Strictly no-hoper John Sergeant a run for his money. Viennese Whirl? Give me three. Viennese waltz? Does it come with coffee?

As a teenager, I was just as embarrassed by my own dancing as anybody else’s. I avoided nightclubs like the plague, knowing full well that I was more Tony Green than Tony Moreno. Actually, I may be doing a disservice to the former, who probably knows his way around a dance floor almost as well as he does a darts board – but in any event, certainly better than me.

Still, by the time I was in my twenties I was fully reconciled to not being part of the cool crowd, and it had a loosening effect. With enough drink inside me, I would stride into cheesy clubs like the Clapham Grand, pretend I was in the video for “Thriller”, and not give two hoots at the startled looks around me.

At a wedding, when – as can only happen at a wedding – one of those large circles of people had formed as if by magic around the dance floor, I did a 180-degree spin, moonwalked (well moonshuffled) to the centre, grabbed my crotch and pointed to the sky. The crowd, in my very hazy memory, went wild.

It is the same enthusiasm which I bring to my kitchen dancing displays today. Talent is irrelevant, it’s self-confidence that matters. And when I combine my double side-step with some comedic grapefruit juggling, it brings the house down.

While I generously hand out nines or 10s to the kids, my own effort at a jaunty Charleston is met with howls of derision and cries of ‘one’ – or ‘two’ if I’m lucky

I know it won’t last long. My five-year-old son might humour me for a while yet; but it’s surely only a matter of months – a year or two at most – until my daughter, now 11, will find it all too cringeworthy for words. Unless those words are: “Dad, you’re so embarrassing; I hate you.”

In any case, Bill Bailey is currently ruining it for middle-aged men everywhere. For years, “dad dancing” has been a thing: a byword for self-indulgence over aptitude, for self-belief over self-awareness; the embodiment of tragic male decline. And while it might have embarrassed generations of children, at least it was to be expected. Throwing shapes poorly in your forties was almost as much of a rite of passage as throwing up drunkenly in your teens. It was as inevitable as a Liberal Democrat resurgence. But not any more.

Bailey has long been renowned for his musicality as much as for his comedy, but only in combination. With his reputation as a funny-man it seemed a reasonable assumption that he would play this season’s <i>Strictly Come Dancing</i> for laughs. Well, not a bit of it.

In fact, not only is Bailey an excellent dancer, he has resolutely refused to do anything other than take the whole thing super-seriously. His street dance of a fortnight ago even bagged him a perfect 10. And for all the kids watching this 55-year-old moving like Justin Timberlake, it rather begs the question of why their own 41-year-old father moves like Justin Fletcher.

As if there were any doubt, a Strictly-style points system in our living room has hammered the message home. While I generously hand out nines or 10s to the kids, my own effort at a jaunty Charleston is met with howls of derision and cries of “one” – or “two” if I’m lucky.

So off I slope to the kitchen, to strut my stuff alone and unharried, encouraged only by a ghostly refrain of “keeeeep dancing”, as Bruce Forsyth cackles at me from beyond the grave.