Dance associations estimate that another 1,000 teachers on top of the present 6,000 are needed to teach Britain to waltz, foxtrot and cha-cha-cha once again.

The problem is that it takes 200 hours of lessons to learn to dance, and two or three times that to learn to teach. Dancing the old-fashioned way has not been this popular since the Thirties and Forties, when competitions were sponsored by national newspapers and spectators filled venues such as Earls Court to see the latest throwaways, oversways and contra-checks from the world’s leading dancers. The winners were nearly always British.

But Britain exported its talent to Europe and the Commonwealth, while neglecting to develop it at home. Germany, South Africa and nearly all of Eastern Europe have fast-growing competitive dance scenes, and even China is catching up. Here, the music almost stopped for ballroom dancing after rock’n’roll heralded the Swinging Sixties and pop music kicked in during the Seventies. Surviving dance halls were subsumed by bingo in the Eighties.

Presenters of Come Dancing, such as Terry Wogan, ensured that the romance of dancing cheek-to-cheek was parodied to the extent that young people declared that they would rather have two left feet than don the sequins, lipstick and fake tan. Apart from competitions dominated by foreign couples, ballroom retreated into the sheltered seclusion of the tea dance, enjoyed mainly by pensioners.

Even the dream that ballroom dancing would become an Olympic sport seemed doomed after it failed to gain such recognition. Then Bruce Forsyth bridged the generation gap with the new celebrity-based format for Strictly Come Dancing, and ballroom was reborn. The show has been exported and has spawned several spin-offs, such as Graham Norton’s Strictly Dance Fever. There has even been a children’s version on

CBBC. It is because teachers are usually drawn from the pool of former child and teenage dancers that there is now such a shortage.

Nigel Horrocks, chairman of the Dance Promoters’ Association, who employs ten teachers at his school at Tyldesley, near Manchester, said that the demand was immense. “Every night is just so busy. There has been a 50 per cent increase in pupils every night. We have more than 500 on our books.”

Keith Holmes, chief executive of the International Dance Teachers’ Association, said: “We need another 1,000 teachers to cope with the demand created by Strictly Come Dancing. It is far better if you can find people who started dancing when they were children. They make much better teachers than adults coming in from the competitive side.”

Alan Homer, who helped to set up and run the Everyone is Born to Dance scheme, is working with the Youth Sport Trust to try to get ballroom dancing into every school. He is seeking 450 teachers. He said: “Quite how we are going to find them, I do not know.”

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