Craig Revel Horwood on only needing five hours of sleep a night

“I am quite a good sleeper,” he confesses. “But I only ever really get five to six hours a night, which is fine for me. I think probably because I was in the theatre for so long and a dancer, you end up exhausted and then you flop into bed and boom – you sleep. And then five or six hours later, I’m awake and raring to go again.”

However, the Strictly Come Dancing judge, 56, admits Margaret Thatcher’s schedule (the late former prime minister was famously said to only need four hours’ sleep a night) would be a bit too much, even for him.

Before Revel Horwood gets to sleep, he needs to get his mind ready – particularly if he’s just come back from a show “and you’re still quite wired from it”, he says. “Unlike most normal people, you finish at 11 o’clock at night. So when you come home, you need a couple of hours to calm down,” the dance ace explains.

His evening ritual involves some kind of hot drink: “I have a hot chocolate, or failing that an Ovaltine or Horlicks,” he says. “And that just calms me down.”

Another important step is what Revel Horwood calls having to “change my mind into something else – I might watch a bit of telly, or listen to a bit of radio, or reading always sends me to sleep,” he explains. “If my mind is too active from work, then I need to think of something else. I’ll put on a bit of inane telly where I get bored, or a nature programme. It slows me down and gets me in the mood for sleep.”

Revel Horwood isn’t even averse to using a bit of tech to help him drift off – but maybe not in the way you’d think. He’s absolutely against screens at bedtime, something his fiancé Jonathan Myring is guilty of (“I think phones really should be banned from bedtime,” he says), but he uses a device that tells “stories, like a wave machine. You’d hear the sounds of the ocean and they’d be saying, ‘And now you’re entering through another door’,” Revel Horwood explains with a laugh.

“It sounds mad but it does actually work, and the lighting gets dimmer on this radio – it’s brilliant. It’s something I have next to the bed, which is quite interesting – it’s to induce a really calming night’s sleep. It clears your mind of any worries that you’ve had during the day.”

The other thing he suggests is key to a peaceful slumber is getting the right sleeping position – which is why he’s teamed up with Dreams to come up with the best positions inspired by dance moves.

What he does throughout the day can play a part in helping make sure he gets a good night’s sleep too – while boosting his mental and physical health at the same time.

“I do have a home gym. We’ve got a rowing machine – that’s always good to do half an hour on,” Revel Horwood reveals. “You only need 30 minutes a day – a lot of people think they haven’t got time to do that, but you could do 15 in the morning, and then 15 in the evening. That’s not much at all, is it?”

When he’s doing a panto – and this year, he’s starring as the Wicked Stepmother in Cinderella at The Mayflower Theatre in Southampton – he doesn’t need to spend as much time in the gym. As Revel Horwood explains: “When I’m doing panto I’m dancing all the time, so I conserve my energy for that. Dancing is a fantastic way of getting exercise without knowing you’re really exercising, because it’s so much fun to do with music, and it gets the heart rate up.”

He has never really had much trouble sticking to an exercise regime – as a dancer, he says you need to be quite “disciplined” – until the first lockdown of 2020. “I was celebrating that I had some time off,” he shares, admitting he didn’t do as much physical activity as normal. “But then after three months of that, it becomes tedious, doesn’t it?”

Stress can definitely get in the way of good sleep – and that’s something Revel Horwood is really trying to avoid with planning his wedding with Myring, but it’s proving tricky.

“We tried to get marquees and everything for next year, but that’s not working because everyone is trying to get married now,” he says with a groan. “There’s a two-year backlog of people trying, so we decided to do it in 2023.”

Revel Horwood is glad it’s not too soon though, because “that gives us another year and a half to plan – because it does take ages”.

The couple want to have the wedding in the garden of the house they’ve just moved into. “We’ve got planting to do and a lot of work to do on the house to get it ready for that particular day,” says Revel Horwood. “At least it’s given us a goal and a good motive. That’s what most people need, isn’t it?”

To celebrate the launch of Dreams’ new slumber guru Log, Craig Revel Horwood has partnered with Dreams and sleep expert Sammy Margo, to co-create a visual guide of sleeping positions inspired by dance moves. Download the Sleep Like Log guide here dreams.co.uk/sleeplikelog