Candice Brown has said she was “upset” to be the first celebrity to be voted off Dancing On Ice.
The former Great British Bake Off champion, who lost in the skate-off against singer Lemar on Sunday night, also said that taking part in the show was the “hardest” thing she has ever done.
Asked on ITV’s This Morning about her departure, the 33-year-old said: “I was upset. I’ve loved every single second of it.
“There has not been one day since I started this where I thought ‘I don’t want to do this today’.”
Our first couple to skate home from #DancingOnIce is @CandiceBrown and @TheMattEvers 💙 pic.twitter.com/5XUpWXhwS2
— Dancing On Ice (@dancingonice) January 14, 2018
Brown and professional partner Matt Evers received the fewest votes in the first show of the series, so had to compete against the lowest-placed competitors in the latest outing.
She faced Lemar and his partner Melody Le Moal on the ice in a bid to hold on to her place in the competition.
Judges Jason Gardiner and Ashley Banjo chose to save Brown, while Jayne Torvill opted to save Lemar and head judge Christopher Dean cast the deciding vote to save Lemar.
Asked by This Morning hosts Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, who also present Dancing On Ice, if she had assumed she was safe from elimination at first, Brown said: “I didn’t think anything.
“I didn’t know how it was going to go; we’d watched Lemar and he was amazing, we were stood there cheering him on. He was incredible.”
Evers praised Brown for working hard to improve in the week between shows.
“She put in so much time and so much effort, the big improvement that everybody noticed – it’s night and day,” he said.
Brown said of the experience: “It was the hardest thing I have ever done. I had to ask (Evers) how to bow two weeks ago, and I’ve been practising my smile every day.”
Evers added that Brown, who won Bake Off in 2016, lacks television experience, and that he had to “teach her what a TV camera looks like” and “what it feels like to be in the spotlight, to bow, to be live in front of an audience”.
Brown said of Evers: “I just adore him. He has taught me more than anybody will ever realise about myself.
“Three months ago, if someone said to me ‘You’re going to be spinning around, upside down, holding on to Matt’s boot, then you’re going to land it, then you’re going to snog his face off on live television’, I’d have gone ‘No!’”
Brown’s comments came as it was revealed that the second episode of Dancing On Ice, which has been rebooted after a four-year absence from screens, dropped nearly one million viewers compared with the launch episode.
Sunday’s programme was watched by an average of 6.5 million viewers, compared with the series’ opener the previous week, which pulled in an average overnight audience of 7.4 million.