It went so well that when the pair wowed the judges and viewers to reach the final, they waltzed to the Anfield anthem again.
“The relief I felt to do a good job on it made me feel so proud and the reaction was unbelievable,” he says. “When you get messages from Everton and Man United fans saying kind things about You’ll Never Walk Alone, what more can you do?
“So we did it again in the final and got a perfect score, Dianne’s first in eight years, and we couldn’t have done it better. Tommy [Blaize] sang it and said he couldn’t look up as he’d start crying so just stared down at his music.
“Afterwards I got a lovely email from Gerry Marsden’s daughter to say what it would have meant to Gerry to see how we performed it in the final.”
Chris is a lifelong Liverpool FC supporter, but coming from this city things could have been very different and maybe Dianne would have had to choreograph a dance to Z-Cars had his family been Evertonians.
“I landed on my feet as a Red,” he laughs. “My best mate is a Blue so it’s luck of the draw in this city!”
Chris spoke to the LFC matchday programme to raise awareness of Unite For Access, an annual campaign celebrating inclusion and accessibility at sports venues. Despite his sight declining as he grew up, he’d already caught the football bug and adapted to find different ways of following the Reds.
“I was slowly going blind since I was born due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa and lost my sight completely aged 22, so I used to listen to the radio a lot for football,” he explains.
“My job now is quite antisocial in terms of working evenings and weekends and I spend a lot of time in the car. The radio is my way of consuming football, but if I’m honest, whenever possible I just put Steve Hunter from LFCTV on.
“We were doing a dress rehearsal for Strictly one Saturday afternoon and in the dress rehearsal you run through the whole show. I had to stand there and pretend to watch every other dance in the actual show, but Liverpool were playing that afternoon so when I’d done my bit I sat in the corner with my headphones on and listened to Steve’s commentary.
“When he gave me a shoutout in the commentary – ‘a big shoutout to one of our own, Chris McCausland, who is doing well on Strictly’ – I nearly fell down the stairs! If you’re reading, Steve, I appreciate it and it made me feel like a million dollars.
“I love a bit of biased commentary and Aldo [John Aldridge] screaming when we score, but a good commentator is very important when you’re blind. That’s why following Liverpool is better on the radio for me than the telly as the TV commentators don’t tend to bring anything to life like Steve and radio commentators do.”