Flavia and Vincent are terrific tango dancers, as regular viewers of Strictly Come Dancing have seen many times.

Training up an amateur partner to a standard where they can appear on television with a top professional is pretty hard work, and, I guess, not as artistically satisfying as appearing with a fellow professional of the same standard.

I asked Flavia whether she is happier in this fully professional show.

“Yes I am. The highlights for us on Strictly were when we danced together doing our show numbers. That was the most rewarding part, because when we’re dancing with our professional dance partners we can push the boundaries a little bit, and do what we do best.

“But I have to say that what the amateur partners achieve on Strictly is quite mind-boggling, and I don’t really know how they manage to do it in the time that we have.

“But it comes together somehow, and when you look back and see what they managed to do in just a few days it is an amazing achievement for them,”

Dancing with professionals may be more rewarding, but doing a whole show in which they dance almost all the time is a lot more tiring than performing a couple on numbers on Strictly.

“This show is very, very tough physically, it’s very demanding; but having said that, we absolutely love doing it. We just love going on, and once the music starts you just get taken over by it.

“We’ve got a great orchestra on board with us, and they give us the energy to recreate what we do seven or eight times a week. We absolutely love them. Music is the most important thing, and they’re amazing; we wouldn’t be able to perform every single night without them.”

The orchestra in question is Tango Siempre, who have performed many times in this area, often in their own show, with singer Miguel Angel. They are very much influenced by the legendary tango innovator Astor Piazzola, ‘The king of Tango Nuevo’, who modernised the tango style. The choreography for Midnight Tango is all the work of Flavia and Vincent.

“The producer (Arlene Phillips) and director came up with a concept, and we met them several times and came up with a storyline that we could use, and then we tried to find music that would fit the story.

“So we have highs and lows within the music. That was very time-consuming, and at the time we weren’t really sure whether it was going to work.

“But the hardest thing was for us to go away and choreograph, because we didn’t have all the couples with us at the beginning, so we were trying to choreograph all these different numbers for different couples with just the two of us.

“It was a very tricky thing, not an easy task, probably one of the hardest things we’ve had to do, but one of the proudest things we’ve done.”

Having two choreographers, even if friends, can produce some problems, and I asked Flavia how they work together to create the dances.

“We do work it out together. The most important thing is for us to have the music. We can’t choreograph anything without the music. So once we know what we are dancing to, it becomes much easier, and we both come up with ideas.

“We try things out, make suggestions, and go from there. Some things will work, some won’t, and that’s how we come up with some crazy ideas. Then we met with the other dancers and talked about what we wanted to create and explained the story line, and, obviously, started teaching them the steps.

“The story is about Vincent getting jealous because I’m flirting with a guy called Giraldo, who’s a sort of lounge lizard who tempts me away to dance with him. There’s also an older couple who run the bar, and they have a quarrel in the first half of the show, but make it up again later on.

“The cast are all amazing dancers, they have a very free style of dancing; everybody has their own style, so we make sure that they all have moments when they can show what they do best. Making this show was quite a time-consuming thing to do, but we’re very lucky to have them on board with us. The story happens in a bar in Buenos Aires, and we wanted various characters who would give it variety, and that’s what we’ve got.

“We have several Argentinians, Italians, French, Colombian, two English girls and Spanish too, so we’re a mixed bag, but they’re some of the best tango dancers in the world.”

Midnight Tango is at the New Theatre on July 2 and 3 and at Milton Keynes Theatre from July 10 to July 13.