Chris McCausland’s Brazilian firecracker wife who talked the blind comedian into signing up to Strictly and giving the performance of his life

There was joy among BBC bosses when Chris McCausland agreed to sign up to Strictly.

Finally, after years of trying to get a blind contestant, they had their man. And he’s hilarious and likable, too.

They thought he would last a few weeks, bringing some much-needed fun to the controversial show, which, at the time Chris signed, was still in the middle of the vicious feud between Amanda Abbington and Giovanni Pernice.

It’s fair to say that the scandal had cast a black cloud over the beloved series.

For Liverpool-born Chris, 47, who has not been able to see since his early 20s when he lost his sight due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa, it was a big decision.

Would he embarrass himself? Would he be a joke? The most important thing for him, however, is: would he abandon the blind community of which he is such a proud member?

It turns out he did none of these things. Quite the opposite, in fact, and now, sensationally, he is the runaway favorite to lift the glitterball trophy in tonight’s final.

And we have one woman to thank for that: Chris’ beloved wife Patricia. She was the one who persuaded Chris to take part in the programme, while his daughter Sophie, 11, took the opposite view, fearing her father would hurt himself.

Patricia will be discreetly present in the audience and cheer on her husband.

A friend of the couple says: ‘Patricia always has confidence in Chris. He was so worried about not giving his best during the competition, but she never doubted his abilities.

‘She is very private and does not long for the spotlight, but don’t be fooled by her silence; she has been with him every step of the way. She is his rock.’

Their love story began when he was a young, young stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2005.

He met Patricia Mazure, who was born in Brazil but came to Britain as a child because she was a TV producer for Sky making a program about the festival.

When the cameras stopped rolling, there was an instant connection between them, and they were soon spending more time together in London.

Romance blossomed and was strengthened by a shared love of music. When Chris took Patricia to see rockers Pearl Jam in London’s Hyde Park in 2010, he promised himself he would propose to her if the band played their favorite song, Black.

They did, and she said yes – right in the middle of the performance. Three years later, Chris became a father after Patricia gave birth to Sophie.

Being a father wasn’t something Chris was confident he could do. He said: ‘The idea of ​​being a parent and all the things I couldn’t do properly, all the things my father did to me as a child, I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to do that? do all these things? I won’t be a real father; I will be half a father. And that caused me a lot of headaches.’

But Patricia gave him confidence, and they now live in a development in Surbiton, south-west London, not far from Kingston University, where Chris studied computer engineering.

Friends say Chris found parenthood “really hard” at first, but he soon discovered a way to make it work as a blind father. “My daughter knows nothing other than that I can’t see,” he says.

“She learned that she could point things out to my wife, and she put my hand on things with me. That’s how she learned to communicate with us.’

The couple married in 2012 and will celebrate 20 years together next year.

Chris says of his wife: ‘We were opposites. I mean, she seems very British, but she’s Brazilian. I don’t mean this negatively, but her life is chaos in the way Brazilian people are chaos. It is a culturally natural characteristic that they are proud of.

‘The number of times she talks to her mother in Portuguese and I say to her, ‘Everything’s fine, what happened?’ It sounds like you had the most horrible argument.” And it turns out they were just talking about what they were going to do that day.

“She’s full of energy and has taken me out of my comfort zone, and I think I just make her laugh. I was almost the calming presence in her life that she was drawn to; it was something she didn’t have.’

Tonight Chris will compete against Love Island star Tasha Ghouri, Miranda actress Sarah Hadland and singer JB Gill in the final.

He owes a lot of his success to his professional Strictly partner Dianne Buswell, who managed to tailor their training, with Chris literally having to find his way through the moves and imagine what a dance should look like see through description.

However, it wasn’t without mishaps: early in the series, Chris revealed how the Australian dancer had accidentally kicked him in the face during a training session, while he didn’t realize her foot was coming.

Whatever she did, it worked: they haven’t once been in the bottom two (who have a dance competition every week), and now that tonight’s voting is open to the public – the judges’ scores are not taken into account – they are tipped to win.

Chris and Dianne will reprise their Couple’s Choice from week eight, danced to Instant Karma (We All Shine On) by John Lennon; and their final dance will be the waltz, with the choice of song poignant given Chris’s Scouse roots – the Liverpool football anthem You’ll Never Walk Alone, by Gerry And The Pacemakers.

Perhaps the most magical moment was their American Smooth dance in Blackpool, where a dapper Chris, dressed in white tie, led Dianne with poise and grace, winning the judges a 37 out of 40 – their highest score.

Then there was his Wayne’s World performance, where he and Dianne dressed up as characters from the 1992 American comedy film. The audience was hysterical.

Just as he has overcome his disability, Chris has revealed he has found a way to avoid being able to see Sophie.

As a computer engineer, he movingly described how, using AI, he had been able to devise a way to “bring her image to life.”

He takes pictures of Sophie and uses specialized technology to get a description of her and what she is doing, as well as the expression on her face.

This technology will no doubt be used to capture her reaction when Chris hits the Strictly dance floor for the final time.

He told me this week: ‘Sophie has said she’s very proud of what we’ve done and she says every Saturday: ‘It doesn’t matter if you go out Dad, because I think you’ve already won.’ ‘