Stacey Dooley has just seen a mouse scuttle across the floor next to her. She lets out a shrill cry and abruptly scurries out of the room.
I’m a little baffled. This is a woman who has journeyed to Baghdad on her own, come face to face with an ISIS fighter, been arrested in Japan while making a documentary about sexual exploitation and taken on everything from domestic violence to the devastating environmental impacts of the fashion industry. A mouse?
Really? She laughs when I say this, but mutters when we settle in a different room, ‘I just fucking hate mice.’ Two days before we meet, Stacey is on Strictly Come Dancing with her partner Kevin Clifton. Their dance, a waltz to Moon River, is rapidly hailed as a ‘showstopper’ (judge Bruno Tonioli even goes so far as to say Audrey Hepburn herself would have loved it).
The day after we meet, Stacey is on-screen again – this time in her latest documentary, The Young And Homeless. At one particularly moving point, she meets two teenage girls who, too embarrassed to admit they are homeless, pace along the streets all night just so people won’t realise they have nowhere to go.
Stories like those are exactly why the 31-year-old chose to do Strictly. ‘This year has been particularly heart-breaking,’ she says. ‘We’ve done a lot in Iraq, the Middle East, Latin America. And it was just painfully sad. We’d be walking over dead bodies to get where we needed to be. Sometimes, it’s healthy to take a step back.’
Strictly, in that sense, has been ‘total escapism’. Was she ever concerned that dancing the paso doble on a Saturday night might impede her chances of being taken seriously as a documentary maker? ‘Lots of people said that, actually,’ she admits. ‘But I think with Strictly, it is such a credible, classy show. Kate Silverton is a perfect example of that. She’s been reporting in Afghanistan and does the 10 o’clock news. So no, I wasn’t too worried about that.’
Stacey is often described as a ‘normal girl’ who is put in extraordinary situations. But with her copper hair and clear skin (she’s stopped eating dairy which, she says with an eyeroll, helps keep it blemish-free), I’d say she is ordinary-ish. A very pretty, fiercely focused normal girl, if anything.
It feels like the Strictly she’s chosen to do is the most significant for a long while. Yes, there are the names that the nation have fallen in love with (Stacey, Joe Sugg), but there has also been plenty of drama. Notably, when comedian Seann Walsh was photographed kissing his dance partner Katya Jones (despite him being in a relationship and her being married to one of Strictly’s other professional dancers).
An explosive open letter by his (now ex) girlfriend Rebecca Humphries sent the story nuclear. I’m obviously desperate to know what it was like on-set when it was all kicking off. Stacey is nonplussed. ‘I suppose, because of my job, who’s snogging who doesn’t really matter to me,’ she shrugs. ‘I wasn’t really that involved.’
She admits there’s a WhatsApp group of all the Strictly contestants called ‘This shit got real’, but insists no one was talking about the kiss. ‘I didn’t really know what was going on. You are with your partner the whole time, and only see the group on Friday and Saturday. Then you’re panicking about your dance, like that’s the most important thing in the world.’ And you have to wonder where Stacey might find the time for such gossip. Each week, she rehearses non-stop with Kevin, in studios in London and Brighton (where she lives with her boyfriend Sam and their dog Bernie).
After our interview, she’s off to promote her new documentary, which was made for BBC Children In Need. And then, once Strictly’s over, it’s back to the day job – spending weeks and sometimes even months at a time focusing on her subjects (it’s a 50/50 split, she says, between what she comes up with and what the BBC suggests). Next on her list is a documentary about a man in Middle America who invented a gun. ‘It’s completely legal, completely above board, she says. ‘But how does that make you feel? Aren’t you responsible for murders?’
She looks me in the eye as she says it and I see a flash of what has made Stacey quite so successful: her disarming way of hitting her interview subjects with big questions in a surprisingly distilled, direct way. She’s aware that not everyone is in favour of her style. ‘I’m fine with it,’ she says. ‘At the start, it was a real split camp: some people were like, “Oh, she’s a breath of fresh air.” Other people said, “She’s not even a trained journalist and left school at 15. What the fuck are the BBC doing?” But why does there need to be one style of journalism? There’s room for everyone. Particularly in the Beeb.’
She’s never asked how her salary at the BBC compares to male stars, as she feels she has ‘enough’. But she backs the principle of equal pay. ‘I’m established now, I’ve been working for 10 years,’ she says. ‘Our documentaries are the most watched on iPlayer. I deserve to be paid the same as men.’
Earlier this year, Fashion’s Dirty Secrets, which took a close look at the environmental impact of fashion in stark terms, changed the conversation around sustainability. It revealed, for example, that cotton is such a thirsty plant that it takes an astounding 7,000 litres of water to create a single T-shirt. That 300,000 tonnes of clothes are dumped in landfill every single year. And, alarmingly, that many brands are refusing to take responsibility.
Stacey says she was ‘absolutely the right person to front the documentary’, because she loves clothes. ‘I was always like, “Oh it’s not doing any harm,”’ she says. ‘My priority was always human rights, but sustainability is key. Now, I try to buy staple pieces and make sure I am going to wear them loads of times. I try to be more mindful and less greedy.’ She’s still disappointed that big brands didn’t come forward. ‘I think it’s really irresponsible, and it’s really short- sighted. I hope the consumers and the influencers have enough information to be like, “Actually, this is important to us. You should be listening.”’
I wonder if she’s the sort of person who has a game plan about where they’d like their career to take them, or if she’s just happy to see what happens. After all, it began after she was discovered working shifts in duty free at Luton Airport, aged 20 (she was chosen to appear as part of a group in Blood, Sweat And T-shirts, which led to her own show being commissioned). ‘I’m somewhere in the middle,’ she says. ‘I work hard. That’s probably one of my only strengths. I work all the time.’
That hard work has shown week after week on Strictly. Did the desire to win kicked in early? ‘My first thing was, “Don’t go out first.” But of course, people think “Who’s going to win it? Who’s going to be in the final?” You want to do well because you have completed your journey. But also, I have perspective because of what I do for work. Nobody is going to die if I’m not in the final. Nothing is going to significantly change.’ And yet, even if she hadn't of won, the show has ensured that Stacey’s life will never be the same again.