‘I've become known as the judge who cries!'

This week’s columnist: Ceramicist Keith Brymer Jones

- VICKI POWER

Once or twice behind the scenes on The Great Pottery Throw Down, I’ve done a little Highland fling or a tap dance, just to amuse my colleagues, presenter Siobhán McSweeney and my fellow judges. They were pretty astonished to see me – a potter who looks like a bricklayer – break into dance!

But I studied dancing from the age of three to 18 and, although I’m now a 56-year-old ceramicist and a judge on Throw Down, I owe a lot of my success to dance.

I did all kinds – ballet, modern, tap, and Scottish dancing. As a kid growing up in north London, I looked like a stick insect. My mother took me to dance classes because my big sister was doing them and she wanted us in the same place at the same time.