Stacey Dooley on proving the critics wrong and her powerful new documentaries: "This is a gift"

It is, she volunteers, “evidence” for anyone seeking to confirm that she’s no longer the working-class ingénue who first appeared on our screens 17 years ago – the breakout star of BBC documentary series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts, in which six young fashion consumers were flown to India to see the conditions in which their clothes were manufactured.

Of course, the other thing confirmed by Dooley’s hasty consumption of fancy salads in taxis is that when she’s in work mode, she simply doesn’t stop. Returning last night after a day of interviews and last-minute voiceovers ahead of her latest series of documentaries, she made the mistake of calling home for a pre-bedtime chat with her two-year-old daughter, Minnie.

“I thought I’d catch her before my mum took her up for her bath, but I rang at the wrong time, because it reminded her that I wasn’t there to do bath time. And so she’s crying and then I’m crying. Everyone’s like…” Dooley slips into an impersonation of the startled commuters at her table trying to avert their gaze, only to emphasise that this scenario is “no different to what any working mum has to deal with.”

Over the past 17 years, Dooley has placed ordinary women in extraordinary situations at the centre of her investigations. She’s shadowed battalions of female Kurdish soldiers fighting Isis in northern Iraq; she’s been detained by Tokyo police while investigating child exploitation; and she’s interviewed women like Heydi in Honduras, whose husband hacked off her feet with a machete to stop her leaving him.

For all of that, Dooley’s latest series of documentaries (available on iPlayer from 13 March) reminds us that there are equally powerful stories to be told closer to home. Growing Up Gypsy opens a portal into the lives of three Romany women in the UK, all gently pushing against pernicious perceptions of their community. Meet the Shoplifters examines the shoplifting epidemic, from the perspective of perpetrators and the staff having to double up as security guards. While in Rape On Trial, undoubtedly the most powerful of the trio, Dooley follows three women as they attempt to bring their assailants to justice.

The statistic that prompted Dooley into action was that, in this country, only around three per cent of reported rapes lead to a conviction. Bleak as the numbers are, what will leave a lasting impression on anyone who watches Rape On Trial is the toll that process – irrespective of outcome – takes on the women who waive their right to anonymity in order tell their stories.

As is so often the case with Dooley’s work, it’s the almost incidental details she elicits from her subjects that leave you emotionally blindsided: Lauren talking about the “very charming, very charismatic” boyfriend who she says assaulted her, then asked if she fancied joining him for breakfast. Emma, who went to college to study music and says she was followed into a classroom by a boy in her year who orally raped her. Still in shock, she confided in another female student, who replied, “You’re lucky. He’s quite popular, you know.” After her resulting depression led to a suicide attempt that was averted by a passer-by, Emma’s father took to sleeping by the front door to stop it from happening again.

The purgatorial, prolonged process of securing a conviction – delayed trial dates and last-minute postponements are common – is inadvertently illustrated by the physical transformations the participants underwent over the three years the documentary took to make. Hairstyles change; we see Dooley pregnant with Minnie. “It must have been a continuity nightmare for them to edit,” she says. “But it also brings home how long these women have to wait for some sort of closure.”

In the final months of filming, in France the trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 of the men who raped his wife Gisèle came to its conclusion and with it, Gisèle’s famous declaration: “Shame must change sides”.

“Obviously, I think she’s a f***ing powerhouse,” says Dooley, “but I wonder if even she really understands the magnitude of what she’s done for other women. Because, with the women I spoke to, the concern was always, ‘If I go to the police, will they believe me?’ It’s one of the few crimes where your credibility is immediately brought into question. The bravery it takes is unbelievable. And, you know, it makes you think, when you’ve hung out with these women for as long as I have, and you’re sat in the back of the car after filming, ‘What would I do?’”

Is there a difference between the sort of bravery that makes you report a rape to the police and the sort that sees you, say, shadowing police raids on violent Spanish drug cartels, as she did in 2020? The swiftness of Dooley’s answer suggests this is a subject she’s already given some thought. “If somebody raped me, I don’t think I would go to the police, which is so bleak and such a disappointing realisation… But in terms of what I’ve witnessed, I wouldn’t feel confident.”

It isn’t hard to see why, when it comes to making documentaries, Dooley enjoys a free hand very few BBC journalists are allowed. She rates consistently highly, especially among younger viewers who tend to avoid traditional news formats, although her lack of formal training has, at times, put her under scrutiny.

Back in 2019, hosting an episode of Panorama from a refugee camp in Syria, she erroneously claimed that jihadi brides were making an “IS salute” which – although recently commandeered by jihadi fighters – was actually a Muslim prayer gesture, more commonly used to signify the oneness of Allah. In one of the news reports that followed, The Times suggested that: “The incident raises questions about the decision to promote Dooley, a former shop assistant who has never trained as a journalist, to a senior investigative role.” Given that there could be dozens of people in the team behind a news programme, why did she feel she was singled out?

Picking her words carefully, she says, “there has always been an element of snobbery surrounding who is entitled to take up space when covering current affairs-based issues. Did it niggle away at me? Yes, I think it used to. I was reminded by lots of middle-aged, middle-class men, for a long time, at the start of my ‘career’, that I was unusual.”

Why the air quotes for career? “Well, because it’s funny that it’s played out the way it has. I can’t pretend I had this innate desire to be a storyteller.” Had former BBC3 controller Danny Cohen not seen that potential in her, Dooley says she’d still be stuck in Luton Airport selling cosmetics. She only realised how badly she wanted to succeed in television when, if some critics had their way, it might have just as quickly been taken away from her.

What she knew, however, and what is apparent, is that her previous life has prepared her very well for this one. In Meet the Shoplifters, Dooley – who admits she went through a shoplifting phase in her youth – surveys the seemingly unending game of cat-and-mouse enacted on the shop floor of Bodycare in Manchester, as staff attempt to deal with the procession of teenagers who blithely stride in and help themselves to their favourite lipstick. When confronted, many of them respond in a manner best described as, well, gobby. Ring any bells?

“I was… I would have been 13 or 14, max. So, I would’ve probably been quite robust. Perhaps tried to justify it in some way. But obviously, you look back and think, ‘What the f*** was I doing?”

Dooley is at pains to point out that there were no potentially mitigating circumstances for what she did. “It was mainly clothes, blue eyeliner. Just shit I didn’t need.”

She also says that if her mum Di had found out at the time, there’s no telling what she might have done. Dooley was just two when her parents separated, leaving her mother to singlehandedly raise her while running a pub in Luton. “My mum was pretty much as you’d imagine,” she says. “Really lairy. Outlandish, always had a cig on the go.”

The two are still close. Dooley and Kevin Clifton – the professional dance partner who became her actual partner after the pair won Strictly Come Dancing in 2018 – have recently relocated to Liverpool, where her mother grew up. Di is a daily presence in the couple’s life, looking after Minnie while they are at work.

When her victory on the ballroom dancing show was announced, Dooley recalls that the song played was Tina Turner’s Simply the Best, “which is pretty much the default theme of our family.” When her mum wasn’t pulling pints, she would sometimes wander over to the karaoke machine and belt it out for fun. “It was also the song my nan got cremated to. She went down in a blaze of glory. Literally, in her case.”

It’s to Di that Dooley ascribes her work ethic and competitive streak. If she ever appears on the celebrity version of The Traitors, she says, “I think I’d be a good Traitor. It’d be much more fun than being a Faithful. Would I feel guilty? No, absolutely not! And I’d take all the money at the end. I’ve got a kitchen reno to pay for.”

She was no less determined to triumph when she signed up for Strictly. Speaking to Radio Times, when that season’s contestants were revealed, she declared: “Of course I want to win. Anyone saying they don’t is fibbing!” She laughs as she remembers the “shy, nonchalant” Clifton – who she had only just met – “craning his neck, with a look of, ‘What the f*** are you like? That’s not the answer.’”

But what’s wrong with being upfront about it? “I think you have to pretend to be a bit coy, don’t you? Especially as a young woman. In this country, you can’t be seen to fancy winning.”

The experience clearly gave her sufficient confidence to expand her skills. And why not? So, when the West End came calling – in the form of Danny Robins’s award-winning play 2:22 A Ghost Story – she accepted the offer. Over nearly two decades, I’ve seen Dooley negotiate many challenges, but the only time I’ve ever seen her display the merest hint of imposter syndrome was on The One Show couch last year, when she found herself talking about her role in 2:22 while seated next to fellow guest Celia Imrie.

“I know! You’re right. It was my first real gig. I was performing at the Gielgud, a beautiful old theatre in the heart of the West End. I had to audition, and I was so apologetic, prior to even saying any of the lines to the director.”

When I relay her recollections to Robins, he bats away any notion that she was any less than deserving of the role: “When your work has been studying people, making documentaries, that helps with the process of taking on a character, inhabiting someone else’s thoughts and feelings. That instinct, the ability to deliver something that feels truthful and moving runs through Stacey’s veins.”

She says it’s the work that drives her, not the recognition – which might sound like a platitude until you remember her saying, while dressed as a giant prawn on The Masked Dancer in 2022, that she still hadn’t got around to collecting the MBE she was awarded in 2018. Has she picked it up yet? She shoots the sort of look you might expect from someone who has just remembered a bag of groceries they left on the bus. “That’s daft isn’t it? But no, the only way you can get it is… you know, you have to book it in. There’s a whole ceremony, but I never got around to it. But I was flattered, you know?”

With Clifton presently touring UK theatres starring as Billy Flynn in Chicago, it’s just her and Minnie this evening. Season six of Keeping Up with the Kardashians is on, so once the bedtime routine is done, it’s straight to the sofa. “That’s what works for me. The heavier the work in the daytime, the more I need that hit of escapism at night.” So fraught are the legalities involved in making Rape On Trial, that she expects to continue work on the documentary right up until transmission (13 March).

In the meantime, spring sees her start filming another documentary that will see her through to the end of the summer – at which point rehearsals begin for a “straight” play in the autumn. Does it ever get a bit much?

“Not really. In a parallel world right now, I’m standing at the cosmetics counter in Luton Airport asking people to show me their boarding passes. It was fine, but this…” She leans forward, as if to emphasise that this might be the truest thing she’ll ever tell me, “…this is a gift.” Clearly that trip to Buckingham Palace is going to have to wait a bit longer.

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Stacey Dooley's new season of documentaries starts at 9pm on Thursday 13th March on BBC Three.

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