Trivia

Natasha Kaplinsky, who won the first series, presented part of the second series with Bruce Forsyth, while Tess Daly took maternity leave and gave birth to her daughter Phoebe.

The use of "Strictly" in the title is both a knowing reference to Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom (1992) film, with its underlying earlier similar plot concept of a Pro and a Beginner dancer paired in Competition, and to denote it's difference from yet similarity to the BBC TV series Come Dancing (1949), which is the strictly professional with professional Dance Competition format.

For many years, the series was accused of homophobia by LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) activists for not including same-sex dancing partners. Broadcaster and lifelong gay rights champion Matthew Wright said in 2017: "It's on a public service broadcaster that we all pay for and it denies essentially that same-sex couples exist because it doesn't show any. So how is that representative of the great British public that funds it? It doesn't represent all those people that have had gay marriages, that have had civil partnerships, it doesn't represent who we are as a country." (In 2019, the show's producers finally relented and two male professional dancers, one of whom is openly gay, danced together during a professional dance number)

In series 17, once a couple had to pull out due to injury for the remainder of the series, there was one fewer couple per main Saturday episode. This time gap in the weekly running order could be filled by discretely making the time allotted on the other couples slightly longer. After the Blackpool show, with fewer couples, the time gap was then filled with slightly longer numbers with the pro dancers, with even the judges being showcased, such as Bruno singing, and Craig in drag, who additionally both happen to be gay. These more blatantly camp numbers were possibly also a response to the complaints received about two male professional dancers dancing together in an earlier pro dance.

When the show decided to officially have (openly) gay contestants, pairing with a same-sex professional dancer, a certain portion of the TV audience raised objections as they "didn't want to see that kind of thing" on their screens. This seemed somewhat bizarre to the majority of the audience, and particularly to the shows' gay fan base as, to the public, since season 1, at least 2 of the Judges were widely known to be openly gay, a few of the professional dancers and the celebrities were openly gay, but had been paired exclusively in the traditional male-female, and there had always been a number of gay people working throughout the arts and entertainment, music and TV production industries. But by now, some of the various "Dancing with the Stars" International versions had already featured same sex pairings, so arguably it was time the original version caught up.