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Sarah Hadland was in the midst of a dress rehearsal for her very first Strictly Come Dancing group routine, being lifted into the air by her dance partner Vito Coppola, when a disembodied voice boomed out into the studio. “I just heard: ‘Sarah! Crotch! We need something to cover her crotch!” the actor recalls gleefully. “It was absolutely fabulous.” A member of the costume team “came running down with a bit of perfect matching marabou feather, and within about 10 seconds, it was stitched on the bottom of my dress.” Potential primetime embarrassment averted. “We’re in a parallel universe here, where somebody can just confidently shout out ‘Cover her crotch!’ and somebody appears with the perfect thing to do it,” she says.  

The BBC’s glittering dance competition, Hadland tells me, is an “incredible machine”. And she’s a natural fit for the larger-than-life show, ready to lean into the bedazzled, slightly camp, slightly ridiculous joy of it all. The 53-year-old actor is best known for her role as Stevie, joke-shop manager and best friend to Miranda Hart’s character in the hit sitcom Miranda; she’s also starred in comedies like ITV’s The Job Lot (set in a jobcentre) and BBC Three’s Daddy Issues, appeared on the riotous kids’ show Horrible Histories, and even cropped up briefly in a Bond film, playing an airport worker in Quantum of Solace. And she is certainly willing to poke fun at herself. When we speak over Zoom during a break from dance practice, she apologises for her switched-off camera with a self-deprecating quip: “I’m a bit of a technophobe… we’re one step away from me with a can and a bit of string.”  

Hadland has been a “super-fan of Strictly since it began” and has thrown “Strictly Come Hadders” parties for her friends in the past (she’d always dress up as former pro dancer Kristina Rihanoff). Yet she turned the show down multiple times before finally signing up this year. “When you’re a huge fan of a show, you kind of think, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to be in that,’” she says. Plus, she has always kept her personal life out of the public eye; naturally, she had concerns about the attention it might invite. “I felt, ‘I’m an actor, should I be revealing so much about myself?’” A conversation with fellow actor Sian Gibson, her co-star in comedy whodunnit Murder They Hope, made her change her mind. “She just said to me, ‘Why are you depriving yourself of doing something that you’ll really love? If you don’t do it, I think you’ll really regret not doing it.’ And she was absolutely right.” Hadland also thought to herself: “‘What would I really like to do if I didn’t have to think about what anyone else would think?’ That’s what made me decide, yeah, I’m going to go for it.”   

This year marks Strictly’s 20th anniversary, but lately the show has been in the headlines for less celebratory reasons. Professional dancer Giovanni Pernice has faced accusations of bullying behaviour behind the scenes, and left the show in June (he has strongly denied all the allegations). The following month, another pro, Graziano Di Prima, quit; he later admitted having kicked his partner Zara McDermott during rehearsals. Did these reports tarnish the show’s lustre for Hadland? “I can only take a view on what I know about this year,” comes her measured response. “I think as a result of what’s been going on, so many measures have been put in place that I almost feel like, if you were ever going to do the show, this would be the year to do it.” From her first conversations with producers, she adds, “it was made really clear that all the participants’ welfare and the dancers’ welfare was going to be on top of everybody’s priorities”. 

This year, all participants have chaperones during practice. “There’s always somebody in the rehearsal room with us,” Hadland says (not that she’s really noticed it – she’s been too focused on learning the routine). “There are constantly VT crews turning up. The dancers have a welfare producer that comes and talks to them every week, and I have one that comes and talks to me every week. There are lots of people constantly reaching out to make sure you’re OK with everything, you’re happy with everything, you’re sleeping enough, you’re getting enough food breaks.”  

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And, she says, her “experience with Vito has only been 100 per cent positive”. She can already do a note-perfect impression of his effusive Italian tones; he has nicknamed her Trilli, “which is the Italian for Tinkerbell”. The show’s choreographers have noticed that “this is the first time they’ve seen Vito telling his partner to slow down. Normally he’s the one that needs to calm down!” I’m not remotely surprised – conversation with Hadland moves at a mile a minute (“Sorry, this is quite long-winded!” she’ll apologise, before rattling through a story at hyper-speed and then jumping into another).  

Every season, Strictly fans scrutinise whether some contestants might have an advantage over the rest; it hasn’t escaped their notice that Hadland appeared in shows like Cats and Grease in her late teens. “Obviously that was 35 years ago,” she laughs. She likens getting to grips with ballroom and Latin to “learning a different language. You’ve got a bit of an advantage, because you’ve been able to learn another dance language, but actually, all the rules you’ve learnt don’t apply to this. They’re completely different.” Dance does run in her family, though. Her mother was “talent-spotted when she was a teenager by the Royal Ballet” and danced the lead role in a BBC version of Alice in Wonderland, but eventually dropped out to work behind the glove counter at Harrods, where she met Hadland’s father.  

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When Hadland was at secondary school in Wilmslow, she joined Cheshire Youth Theatre, and later went on a two-week residential trip that “changed my life. We were doing all kinds of mask workshops, drama, dancing, music, singing, everything. I just immediately thought, this is what I want to do.” That course, she notes, was “council funded”, and it “breaks [her] heart” to think that similar opportunities don’t exist any more. “All those things were massively subsidised, there’s no question,” she says. She left home at 16 (“which makes me feel so shocked now: I look at 16-year-olds and I think, oh my God, that’s so young”) and went to study musical theatre at Laine Theatre Arts in Surrey. “My parents had divorced and I was in a single-parent family, so I got a full grant to go to college. These things just wouldn’t have been possible [without it].”  

The erosion of arts funding, she says, is “very, very worrying, because you think: are the arts becoming an elitist sector? Because children from working-class or lower-middle-class families simply will not be able to afford to go [to drama groups]. And these youth theatres are the places where kids learn that these [creative] jobs exist.” It’s not just an issue for actors but for the whole industry, she suggests: “The writers – where is all the material going to come from? Is it going to be from a specific class?”  

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Her first performing job was as a magician’s assistant. “I was crossing the Bay of Biscay, being levitated, after a day’s rehearsal in a lock-up garage in Kettering,” she says. “So that was my introduction to the world of show business.” Then came the West End – but it was a gig in a Birds Eye ad campaign that made her seriously consider acting. “Even though I was 21, I was cast as a 14-year-old, and I was absolutely fuming, and argued a bit with my agent that I didn’t want to do it,” she remembers. “[But] the director was Mandie Fletcher, who directed Blackadder. It was quite a funny little character, and she said, ‘You should get into acting.’”  

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Decades later, Hadland had a “full circle” moment when Fletcher directed the final episode of Miranda, which aired in 2015. The show was, she says, a comedy that was “heartfelt, warm, [with] no malice”. She’s still close friends with Hart, who has taken a step back from the public eye in recent years. In fact, Hart is part of a group of pals who have always maintained that she should try Strictly – and was there when Hadland had to tell a white lie to keep her sign-up a secret. “I was sitting next to Miranda at this gathering, and I was saying, ‘Oh, it’s too late to do it now…’ And I felt really guilty. When it was announced, [Hart and friends] were like, ‘What? How could you keep that [from us?]” 

Their sitcom had an unexpected resonance for teenage girls, she adds. “I’ve been sent folders of lovely letters from girls that felt like they didn’t fit in … [Miranda and I] were these two strong personalities that had a really good friendship. And the number of girls that said that got them through their teenage years, because they would say when they were picked on or bullied: ‘We’re Stevie and Miranda.’” She remembers how one famous critic described the pair of them as “infantilised”. “I know in this country we take our comedy very seriously, and there’s huge snobbery about very popular comedy,” she says. “But I feel really proud to have been part of something that has brought a lot of joy to people.” And, she adds, “I think it’s a real privilege to make people laugh.”  

With that, it’s time for her to return to the “parallel universe” of Strictly. Her first dance, somewhat aptly, will be the quickstep; it’ll be plenty of fun trying to keep up with her.

‘Strictly Come Dancing’ continues on Saturday 21 September at 7pm on BBC One

Portrait credit: Photography by ByPip, makeup by Charlotte Yeomans, hair by Adam Cooke and styling by Rachel Davis

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About 15 minutes into the first episode of Fool Me Once, Michelle Keegan’s Maya gets pepper sprayed in the face by her daughter’s childminder, after the pair have come to blows over a hidden camera disguised as a digital photo frame. I practically whooped with glee. Not because Keegan’s character, a newly widowed army veteran, seemed particularly deserving of comeuppance (she’d just buried her murdered husband, for goodness sake), but because the casual inclusion of a scene so objectively bonkers so early on in this eight-part Netflix series felt like a good omen. From here, things surely would only get sillier and more credulity-stretching. In short, I was going to get precisely what I wanted from the streamer’s latest Harlan Coben adaptation.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Coben, whose name hovers over the title cards of his TV shows to remind us who’s the boss, then your Netflix algorithm is certainly more discerning than mine. All you need to know is this: Coben is the vastly successful American author of 35 mystery novels, and is a fixture on bestseller lists around the world. As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he was a member of the same fraternity as Dan Brown, writer of The Da Vinci Code and overlord of the airport thriller.

Coben’s books tend to take place in monied communities in New York and neighbouring New Jersey, his home state, rather than in dusty museum archives and crypts, but he shares a taste for cliffhangers and bold twists with his old classmate (“If you don’t like twists and turns, I’m not your guy,” he told The Scotsman last year). In 2018, he signed a five-year mega-deal with Netflix, allowing the streamer to adapt 14 of his novels into English and foreign-language TV series. Fool Me Once is the fourth English production, following Safe (2018), The Stranger (2020) and Stay Close (2022), but there are also shows in French, Spanish and Polish.

These dramas are inevitably chock full of gasp-inducing, head-scratching moments (like poor Michelle being temporarily blinded with an aerosol). And instead of being set against their original backdrop (the New York tri-state area) the English-speaking adaptations of Coben’s work all take place in the northwest of England. Their exact location is never spelled out in the scripts (“We think it works better to make it more generic,” executive producer Nicola Shindler has said) but the gratuitous shots of the Runcorn-Widnes Bridge are a massive giveaway. Transplanting essentially American characters into a very British setting gives proceedings an uncanny, slightly artificial feel. Keegan’s character spends most of her time training amateurs to drive helicopters and at the shooting range, which doesn’t ring entirely true. Sometimes the character names are jarring, albeit in an enjoyable way. In The Five, an original drama that Coben created for Sky back in 2016, pre-Netflix deal, the actor Lee Ingleby plays a man named Slade; perhaps his fictional parents were just devoted fans of Noddy Holder and co.

The critical verdict on these adaptations is as up, down and frankly all over the place as some of Coben’s wilder narrative impulses. They’ve been praised as the ultimate guilty pleasure (in a four-star review of Fool Me Once, The Telegraph claimed its plot “moves like a slinky on steroids”, ie erratically and at speed) and derided as “junk food television” (The i), the TV version of empty calories: stories that are delicious in the moment, but ultimately leave you feeling unsatisfied and a bit grotty. The Independent’s chief TV critic Nick Hilton gave it just one star, predicting that tolerance for its high melodrama “will hinge entirely on your ability to switch off your brain and allow proceedings to wash over you”.

But while they might have divided reviewers, they seem to get a pretty resounding thumbs up from Netflix users. Fool Me Once has just been named as the streamer’s global most watched series of 2024, clocking up more than 107 million views. Are these shows good, bad, or so bad they’re good? And why are viewers like me so hooked? The average Coben series is an inviting mix of the unpredictable and the enjoyably formulaic, a bit like an Agatha Christie. We know pretty much what we’ve signed up for; we’re just not entirely sure of the particulars of how things will play out. So twisty is his work that once the final end credits have rolled, it is categorically impossible to recall the specifics of each series’ storylines. Instead, they become tangled up into one big, chaotic spiderweb (remember those biology GCSE textbook pictures imagining what webs spun by drugged-up spiders might look like?)

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The typical plot goes something like this. A woman is, or once was, romantically involved with Richard Armitage, the actor who is the undisputed king of the Harlan Coben TV Universe, with three such series on his CV (“Three’s enough, if not too many!” he told Radio Times last year, in 2023, only to sign up for yet another one a few months back). She is hiding a dark secret, one that connects her to a spate of mysterious disappearances, or a murder investigation that has long gone cold. The Armitage character walks straight into this conspiracy and sets about trying to solve things for himself, usually while pursued by baddies. He is alternately helped and held back by an odd-couple pair of police officers.

For a touch of British Big Little Lies, everyone lives in massive detached homes, and has gorgeous hair that belies their emotional turmoil. There are various convoluted backstories involving childhood games gone wrong, mask-wearing cults or alpacas. Something tends to be awry at the local kids’ football club, where the parents gather to speak in exposition from the sidelines. And if there’s a beloved British comedy star on the cast list – Jennifer Saunders in The Stranger, Eddie Izzard in Stay Close – the odds of them making it to the final episode are high.

In Fool Me Once, there’s a slight shake up: this time, the Armitage character is a dead husband who appears in flashback (or, at least, he’s supposed to be dead – but he still crops up in footage recorded on the sneaky photo frame camera after his funeral). And it’s his widow Maya, played by Keegan, who must do the amateur sleuthing. She’s also burdened by secrets of her own. They relate to her time in the army, we learn, and place her at the mercy of a whistleblower called “Corey the Whistle”, who writes a blog from a shack in the forest. And some adaptations don’t feature Armitage at all.

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In 2018’s Safe, it’s Dexter star Michael C Hall who plays the moody bloke with the dead wife, doing his best British accent. The Five has a quartet of protagonists, who are shaken to learn that the DNA of their long-missing friend has turned up at a crime scene. What they all share, though, is a fast pace and the sort of stress-inducing episode endings that have you pressing “next” against your better judgement. That’s testament not just to Coben’s mad plots but also to screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst’s command of the source material; Brocklehurst has worked on all five English-language Coben adaptations, so has had plenty of practice when it comes to shaping these stories into moreish nuggets.

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Trope-y tales like these mean that the vast line-up of characters are often pretty broadly drawn. But they’re consistently elevated by some of Britain’s most recognisable television performers. As well as Keegan and Armitage, Fool Me Once also features Joanna Lumley as Maya’s wealthy mother-in-law, an acid-tongued matriarch who wafts around the family estate swathed in cashmere scarves, and Sherwood’s Adeel Akhtar as a police officer who keeps mysteriously passing out at the wheel of his car. Stay Close starred Cush Jumbo, who’s more often found performing Shakespeare in the West End.

These shows are, let’s face it, probably not the most challenging dramatic material that they’ve tackled, but it’s fun to see which stars will be called up for the next production, like a thespy form of jury service. In fact, with their impressive cast lists, mega mansions and ridiculous narrative curveballs, they’re essentially a fun-house mirror version of your average ITV psychological thriller, buoyed by a Netflix budget to amp up the escapism. No wonder British audiences can’t get enough of this all-American author. Long may the Harlan-verse continue – and here’s hoping Richard Armitage is on the phone to his agent right now.