Stacey Dooley has been making hard-hitting documentaries for nearly two decades, but now she’s taken on a fresh new challenge – parenting. She talks to Emma Higginbotham
Mother’s Day for Stacey Dooley – the award-winning BBC documentary maker, Strictly Come Dancing champ and smitten new parent – probably won’t involve splodgy homemade cards and unidentifiable cardboard creations this year. Her daughter Minnie only turned two in January, and isn’t up to those levels of artistry just yet.
“Her dad will make a fuss, I'm sure,” says the 38-year-old, who’s chatting to Weekend from her home in Liverpool. “He's good like that. Whenever there's a celebration, he'll really go to town, so I'm sure there'll be fancy flowers. Hopefully a bunch of mimosa, which are my favourites. And maybe a good cup of tea.”
‘Her dad’ is, of course, Kevin Clifton, Stacey’s partner in both Strictly and life. The couple moved up north from London 18 months ago, partly to be nearer her mum and his parents. “We love it. We’re so, so happy,” she says. “Our Waitrose isn't far, and Minnie’s got a little Waitrose trolley which she brings along and does her shop. Which means everything takes 10 times longer.”
Stacey’s “little werewolf” has turned her life upside down in the best possible way. She’s also the inspiration for her new book, Dear Minnie, which looks at pregnancy, birth and parenting through the eyes of 20 very different women. Their experiences cover the whole mothering gamut, from IVF, adoption, lone parenting, disability and juggling triplets to sleep deprivation, back-to-work guilt, and just the sheer befuddlement of being in charge of a tiny human.
“When I was flirting with the idea of a motherhood book, I was so aware that I don't have all of the answers,” Stacey explains. “I was very lucky. Falling pregnant was straightforward, my pregnancy was straightforward, my birth was straightforward, and that's not representative of every mother in the UK. And I didn't want it to be too ‘oh this is great, this is easy, this is brilliant’ or ‘oh this is bleak, this is grim, I'm in the trenches’, because it’s all of those things at different times.”
What makes the book unique is that each experience begins with a letter from mother to child. Starting, naturally, with Stacey’s own (very funny) letter to Minnie. She writes about taking a pregnancy test in the ladies loos of a department store, and not telling anyone beyond their immediate family for months, until ‘my boobs were so bloody enormous’ that she didn’t want people thinking they’d been surgically enhanced. And how, ‘eight months preggers’, she found herself filming with Ukrainian civilians who were being trained by the British army, while ‘waddling around a freezing cold field, dodging grenades’.
“The letter is me going ‘I've become a mum! This is how I feel, what about you guys?’ And the women who very kindly wrote their own letters were so brilliant,” she says. “Some of them are really funny, and some are really heartfelt.”
What would her own mum, Diane, write in a letter to Stacey? “Oh god!” she exclaims, and laughs. “Well, I was apparently a dream baby – I find that very hard to believe – but then in my teenage years, I was pain in the arse. Really naughty. No respect for authority. But from my 20s onwards, I’ve been very boring, so I've done a complete 360 with her over the years.”
Born in March 1987, Stacey grew up on a council estate in Luton. Her Irish father had left when she was a toddler, and money was so tight that Diane worked multiple jobs. What did Stacey want to be when she grew up? “I wanted to be in Destiny’s Child, like everybody else,” she grins. “No, I can't say I always wanted to make documentaries or tell stories. I didn't. I fell into this line of work, and thank God I did, but it was all completely accidental.”
On paper, Stacey is hardly BBC material. She left school at 15 with no qualifications (she sat three GCSEs, but didn’t bother collecting the results), and drank, smoked and shoplifted her way through her teens. “Some kids study, and have a real discipline, a real focus, but I just…” She pauses. “I was never mean, or bad, just naughty and carefree. There was a real freedom about me as a kid, just running around doing whatever I wanted to do, and that stretched for a few years. But since I left school, I’ve always been a hard worker.”
Stacey was selling perfume in the duty free shop at Luton Airport when her mum spotted a leaflet from a TV production company. “It said ‘Do you like fashion? Do you like travel? Do you like telly?’,” she recalls. “I rang the number, and they said ‘We're making a series about fast fashion and young British consumers for BBC3, are you interested?’ And I said ‘Yeah, that sounds brilliant’. Obviously thousands of people applied, and then they just kept whittling us down.”
She made the cut and, aged 20, was whisked off to India with five other fashion fans for the four-part series Blood, Sweat and T-shirts. Their job was not just to witness the appalling conditions of the backstreet sweatshops, but to physically sew garments for hour upon hour, even sleeping alongside the other workers on the factory floor.
“The idea was to show that we were complicit,” she says. “We were all running around in T-shirts that cost a couple of quid, and particularly at that time, throwaway fast fashion was almost celebrated. So when we got there, I just thought, this is completely mad, like really unfair. And there was this light bulb moment.”
The turning point was when she spotted a clearly underage boy working in one of the sweatshops. Visibly shocked, she says to the camera: “I feel like I need to do something about this”. The end of the series cuts to Stacey a few months later, cheerily hosting a charity auction for the children of Mumbai’s slums.
Sparky and determined, Stacey had unwittingly made her mark. The commissioning editor for BBC Three called her in for a meeting. “He said, ‘I enjoyed watching you on telly. I found your line of questioning very natural. Would you be interested in doing more stuff for us?’ I was working at Luton Airport at the time, so of course you can't believe you're having these conversations with a boss at the Beeb. It's like, do I want to do my own series? Like, what?!
“I remember him saying ‘Don't cave into the temptation to conform. We've asked you because we like your approach, so just do your thing. Just be you. And that’s served me well.”
It really has. Over the last 18 years, Stacey’s dozens of documentaries from around the world show her pluckily confronting drug lords, arms dealers and sex traffickers, and telling the stories of everyone from child soldiers and abuse victims to homeless teenagers and suicide bombers. As for her most memorable films, she insists she loves them all for different reasons.
“I’m really proud of the work we did in Kurdistan, where we shone a light on the Yazidi community,” she says. “What they've been through was just so harrowing.” Between 2014-17, thousands of Yazidi men were massacred, and women and girls were trafficked, by ISIS, “but they weren’t at the forefront of people's minds, so I'm really pleased that we were able to give them a platform. And closer to home, a film called Two Daughters follows a lady called Nina Smallman, whose daughters were murdered in a park in London. The police [who posed for photos with their bodies] behaved despicably, and thank God they were held to account and got custodial sentences.”
How does she stop the tough stuff from getting to her? “You have to really lean into escapism,” she says. “If you're filming for 12, 14 hours a day covering a really bleak story, and it all just feels very sad, you have to go back to the room that you're staying in and just totally switch off. Telly on the laptop, music on, magazines, just trivial stuff. Also, you have to remind yourself that ultimately there are more good people than bad people in the world. You have to hold on to that.”
It was quite the leap, then, when Stacey swapped her bulletproof press jacket for spangly frocks and spray tan in the 2018 series of Strictly. “At the time, I was just known for doing these serious, earnest documentaries, so I loved the silliness and the campness of it all,” she says. “It’s the best show on telly, really, and imagine if I hadn't done it! My life would have been entirely different.”
She was, of course, partnered with Kevin, the cheeky, thrice-married professional dancer and choreographer from Grimsby. And while Stacey cheerfully admits that she wasn’t the most dazzling dancer, her weekly improvement endeared her to the voting viewers, who traditionally love an underdog. Lifting the glitterball trophy was, she says, “amazing, as you can imagine. I thought Joe (Sugg) would win. He had a cult following, and he was such a sweet young man – they tend to do well on Strictly – so when Tess said our names I was so shocked. As was Kev!”
Stacey was in a relationship with someone else at the time, but something had clicked, and she and Kevin became a couple in 2019. When did they decide to have children? “Do you know, it’s hilarious and ridiculous, but we never really sat down and had ‘the chat’. Some people think long and hard about whether or not they want to be parents. Understandably! It's so massive. But we were just very nonchalant. We were like, ‘oh yeah, in theory, I suppose we’d like a family’. And then Minnie came along.”
Kevin left Strictly in 2020 to concentrate on musical theatre work, and Stacey has dabbled with treading the boards too – last summer she won plaudits for her stint in the West End play 2:22 A Ghost Story. She’s also written books (Dear Minnie is her third) and presented two series of the BBC reality show Glow Up, as well as continuing with the documentaries. Diane looks after Minnie when she and Kevin are working. “They’re thick as thieves,” she says.
Although Stacey admits that parenthood has changed how she tackles her subjects (“everyone is someone’s Minnie”), it hasn’t slowed her down. In the book she recalls Kevin and eight-month-old Minnie flying to the States with her, and bunking down in a trailer so that she could breastfeed between filming sessions in a nearby brothel. Her latest film, released earlier this month, is the powerful two-parter Rape on Trial, which focuses on four young women who were attacked by people they knew. “It took three years to make,” she says. “I do lots of different things now for a living, but it’s the docs I feel very proud of.”
But as a newish mum, Stacey is stepping back from the more dangerous stuff for now. “There's been a couple of things that I thought ‘that would be brilliant’, but it's just not practical. I don't need to be in hostile environments when I have a two-year-old. Some parents do continue that line of work, and that's very admirable, but it’s probably not for me at the moment.”
She also admits she’d like more kids, “but having a child is such a gift, isn't it? You don't know if it's going to go in your favour. We’ll just wait and see how it all plays out. I feel hugely lucky – it's not lost on me. I've got a little girl, Kev's healthy and happy, I'm healthy and happy. Everything's good.”
What would the young rebel Stacey make of how it’s all panned out for her? “It's hilarious, isn't it?” she says, and laughs. “It's so mad how life ends up unfolding. I just feel very, very fortunate. It could have gone very differently for me, I’m sure, so I think she would have found this all very surreal.”
Dear Minnie: Conversations with Remarkable Mothers (BBC Books) is out now
FOOD BITES
What did you have for breakfast? I haven't had breakfast yet, but normally I have porridge with the baby.
A memorable meal? I once had Thanksgiving roast in a prison in Iowa. So that was… different!
What's Minnie's favourite food? It’s very highbrow – she's massively into capers at the moment. She's got such a salty tooth.
Most famous person you’ve dined with? I'm clutching at straws here, but I was at an event once with Barack Obama, and there was a spread. Does that count?
Strangest thing you’ve eaten on your travels? I think I've eaten rat. I can’t remember what country it was, but we were in a market, and they were serving all of these unusual delicacies. They told me it was chicken, but I definitely don't think it was chicken! I didn’t ask too many questions.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in March 2025 (c) Waitrose