Dr Ranj Singh says he would jump at the chance to do Strictly Come Dancing again, but the interview is really about something deeper: the path that took him from a childhood in Medway to a career in medicine, television and stage, and the long delay before he told anyone he was gay. In a Letter to My Younger Self, Singh reflects on the life he built in public and the private struggle that ran beneath it.
Born in Medway, Kent, in June 1979, Singh said he was raised in a traditional Indian family where doing well at school and achievement came first. He knew by the time he was 10 or 11 that he wanted to be a doctor, and he went on to train in medicine before working as a specialist in paediatric emergency medicine. Long before television became part of the picture, the direction of his life was already set.
That medical background later made him a familiar face on screen. In 2012, he began presenting CBeebies’ Get Well Soon, a role that introduced him to younger viewers, while his wider TV career went on to include appearances on Good Morning Britain, Strictly Come Dancing, This Morning and The Great British Sewing Bee. He has also appeared on stage in Scrubs & Sparkles and & Juliet, adding another layer to a career that moved between hospitals, studios and theatres.
But the most revealing part of Singh’s account is the one about identity. He said that at 16, being gay was not on his radar. “Actually being gay was never something my younger self thought about,” he said, adding that he only came out to a friend later in life, when he was around 30. “I was married, and obviously that relationship broke down, and then it was dealing with everybody else, friends and family,” he said. The sequence matters: he did not simply come out in a vacuum, and the consequences reached far beyond one conversation.
That tension between public confidence and private uncertainty gives the story its weight. Singh had already built a career that depended on trust, warmth and consistency, first in medicine and then on television, while still carrying a part of himself that he says he did not understand in youth. Raised with a strong emphasis on duty and success, he said he probably wanted to be “a bit more creative,” a phrase that helps explain how the doctor in him and the performer in him ended up sharing the same life.
Asked about the future, Singh leaves little doubt about where his mind is. “I’d jump at the chance to do Strictly again,” he said. The answer to the bigger question in his story is already there too: after years of balancing expectation, career and self-acceptance, Singh has spoken plainly about who he was, what he hid and how those choices reshaped his life.
