After a few more weeks of European promotion, we went back home to start a new chapter in our careers. And if there’s one thing a new chapter in our career deserves, it’s a new chapter in this book. So what are you waiting for? Go to the next page and get started.
Chapter 13
1995 was shaping up to be our busiest year so far. So busy it felt like the expression ‘kick-bollock scramble’ had been invented just for us. With such a heavy schedule and hardly a day to ourselves, it became increasingly clear what we had to do – star in our own eight-part TV series for Children’s BBC while simultaneously trying to keep our pop career afloat.
Those guys at Zenith Productions had finally made some progress with the TV-show idea. They said they were ready to pitch – telly speak for ‘desperately try and flog’ – The Ant and Dec Show to the BBC. This was incredibly exciting; we’d always felt more at home on the small screen. Plus, making a TV show might mean slowing down our musical output, which would be good news for people with ears everywhere. It turned out we were wrong: it just meant doing a TV show and our second album at exactly the same time.
As you’d imagine, it was important to get the TV show right. It was the BBC, and our big chance to add another string to our bow, so we spoke to the record company, cancelled our press commitments, cleared our diaries and managed to free up a whole afternoon. We spent that afternoon in the Drill Hall, an old theatrical venue in North London, where we filmed a few sketches that had been written for us, using only an old video camera and, of course, our sparkling wit and repartee. The idea was to produce a short tape of the funny bits from this session and send it to Children’s BBC. I imagine that tape lasted around thirty seconds.
Ant doesn’t remember that day at all, but I suppose that’s understandable: people often blank out traumatic or embarrassing moments in their life. I don’t remember much either, but I do recall telling a joke to camera at the end of the day, and the BBC decided they wanted to make the show partly because they loved it. It was completely unsuitable for kids’ TV, but it had made them laugh. This was the joke that sealed the deal:
I stayed in a hotel last night, and in the next room was James Bond. My friend asked me how I knew it was James Bond, and I said, ‘Because all I heard all night was a woman shouting “Oh, Roger, more! Roger, more! Roger, more!”’
And they say TV is full of stupid people. Next thing we knew, it was March, and we were off to the BBC to make our own show.
We turned up at that famous old building in White City and were made to feel at home immediately. Little did we realize that this was the start of what became our full-time career. We discovered we had a natural talent for hanging round TV studios trying to make people laugh and eating free sandwiches. It was the first step on the road to becoming TV presenters and playing heightened versions of ourselves. We were still Ant and Dec, but everything was a bit ‘bigger’ and more exaggerated, because we were on the telly. It’s a strange way to earn a living when you think about it. It wouldn’t work with other jobs. You can’t imagine a traffic warden jumping around saying, ‘Welcome to the double-yellow line. Tonight, you could win a parking ticket,’ but that’s what you do on telly. Most people you see present an extreme version of their personality, although there are exceptions. There are people who are just as unpleasant on screen as they are off it. Not that we’re naming any names, Mr Cowell.
There was some debate about what we were going to call this show. It isn’t an issue for most people on telly. Once they had Jeremy Kyle on board, I can’t imagine it took too long to decide on The Jeremy Kyle Show, but for us it was never that easy. In Byker Grove and as pop stars, we were PJ and Duncan, but our real names, as our more observant readers will have noticed, are Ant and Dec. We were never keen to be called PJ and Duncan as pop stars, but Telstar had insisted on it, and being in the middle of a performing arts B-Tech at Newcastle College at the time of that conversation, we weren’t exactly in the strongest bargaining position. The names caused us problems for years, especially when we did foreign promotion and the audiences had never even heard of Byker Grove. You won’t be surprised to hear that the everyday story of a youth club in the North-east of England wasn’t a big hit on German TV. Now, all we wanted was to be known by our real names. After all, we’d had nearly twenty years’ experience using them, and it seemed a shame to waste it.
It marked our first exposure as Ant and Dec. We went for Ant and Dec in that order, because it was PJ and Duncan – PJ was Ant and, well, you get the rest. I’ve been asked about this, but I never argued for it to be Dec and Ant, I’ve never even really thought about it. It’s really not a big deal. Honestly. I’m fine with it, I really am. It’s not like I still lie awake at night thinking about it, or it’s secretly bothered me for years or anything like that.
The programme itself was a traditional sketch show, although it was different to the other children’s programmes – it wasn’t that funny. We pretty much just performed the scripts we were given. We didn’t get properly involved with it the way we do with our TV shows now. We’d turn up to rehearsals, put in our own little bits – a cabbage on a dog lead, that kind of thing – and the next thing we knew, it was on the telly.
The thing was, we didn’t really have that much confidence or faith in ourselves, we weren’t a ‘real’ double act and we weren’t comedians and, just like our TV show, this was no laughing matter. At the time, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer were huge. Hugely popular that is, not fat. People would ask us if we saw ourselves as the new Vic and Bob, but we were nothing like them. Yes, they were from the North-east and they both had three letters in their name, but there was one big difference: they were brilliant. They were, and still are, legends, and big heroes to us, and we were embarrassed to even be asked if we thought we were in the same league.
We were just a couple of young lads, and we certainly didn’t have an ‘act’, not unless you counted miming to a backing track and doing the running-man dance moves as an ‘act’. Yes, we had the required number of performers for a traditional double act, but we didn’t see ourselves that way. We just didn’t think we were good enough, and we thought if we said we were just two mates having a laugh then maybe, just maybe, no one would notice that we didn’t have a clue what we were doing.
One of the most influential people on The Ant and Dec Show was the director, Anne Gilchrist. Anne saw us for exactly what we were – a couple of frightened young actors pretending to be pop stars who had a TV show to host. It’s no wonder we had a bit of an identity crisis. Anne was incredibly supportive and a constant source of encouragement, always saying stuff like, ‘You can do this’, ‘You can make it work’ and ‘Why are you crying?’ She was absolutely vital to the success of the show and, when it came to TV, she gave us two things we’d never had before – a bit of self-confidence and our own dressing room.
Being on the BBC, and especially Children’s BBC, also brought its own issues for us. We’d never really enjoyed sending mums and aunties out of the room, saving old cereal boxes or using sticky-backed plastic. The BBC always seemed very traditional and educational to us, and we wanted to be a bit dafter than that. Plus, we couldn’t make a cardboard rockery to save our lives.
At the time, we loved shows like The Word, The Big Breakfast and Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. These were programmes that seemed to break all the rules of TV, showing viewers the cameras, the backstage areas and the crew. They deliberately avoided being slick and, when things went wrong, they’d revel in it. They represented a new kind of telly, and we wanted to put some of that into our show. Of course, it was still 4.35 on Tuesday afternoon, we weren’t exactly the Sex Pistols, but we tried to push things as far as we could. We also had guests in the studio with us – including Rolf Harris, Sean Maguire, Bernie Clifton, Su Pollard, Dani Behr and Bill Oddie.
One routine I do remember from that series was when Bill Oddie came on. We asked Bill how Madonna was, then he gave us a confused look and said he’d never met her. ‘B
ut she sang a song about you,’ we told him. Then, to the tune of Madonna’s single ‘Erotic’, we sang, ‘Bill Oddie, Bill Oddie, put your hands all over my body…’. I remember being very pleased with that gag.
But, despite our Oddie-baiting and our intentions to rip up the rulebook, the series still ended up being a bit too BBC and too young for our liking. Whenever we did something funny, which was about once a fortnight, the kids in the audience would react with a staged ‘ha-ha’ because the floor manager had told them to laugh at everything. I can only assume he bribed them. It was a difficult environment to work in – we could never tell what our audience was and wasn’t finding genuinely funny. I don’t think Chris Evans was losing any sleep.
At the same time as rehearsing and recording the TV show, we were making our second album, Top Katz. As you can tell from the title, we were becoming serious recording artists by now. I’m pretty sure Radiohead were quaking in their Doc Martens. Doing two things at once meant we spent all day in script meetings, rehearsals or recording the show, and then, at nights, we’d go off to the studio and work on the album. As a result of this, a lot of the mid-nineties is a bit of blur. It’s been said that Keith Richards ‘doesn’t remember the seventies’, and 1995 is a bit like that for us, but slightly less rock ’n’ roll. We spent the whole time living in hotels in London and developed a varied and extensive knowledge of salty bar snacks.
We recorded the album in bits. The first single was ‘Stuck On U’ and was produced by Ray ‘Mad Man’ Hedges, who’d written for Boyzone. Don’t worry, Ray wasn’t actually insane, it was just a crazy music-biz nickname he’d given himself. Ray was very happy to let us get involved in writing, so we’d contribute lyrics and come up with the odd melody. Some of them were very odd. Maybe it was because we were going a bit mad ourselves, spending our days desperately trying to put together our own TV show and our nights recording our album. Oh yes, we were multimedia long before our time.
In a lot of ways, the TV show and the pop career never really sat comfortably with each other. We’d do sketches about boy bands on the TV show and then, the next day, we’d be back on the boy-band treadmill ourselves. During The Ant and Dec Show, we did a sketch called ‘How to Make Your Own Take That Video’. Take That’s ‘Back For Good’ was the classic boy-band video of the time. It was all black and white, slow motion and pouring rain. Our sketch had me on a stepladder pouring water over Dec while he danced in a ‘strange way’ wearing a ‘really big coat’, all shot in black and white. It worked quite well, but the problem was that, as pop stars, that was exactly the kind of video we would have made – if only we’d had the budget, fan base, good looks and songwriting skills of Take That. Looking back at the video for our ballad ‘Eternal Love’ it showed that we were living those boy-band clichés too. Everyone else could ridicule our music career – and lots of people did – but to be doing it ourselves was dangerous territory.
Pop stars should be unattainable and glamorous, whereas TV presenters should be approachable and down to earth. With a TV show, you’re inviting the hosts into your home – not literally, although if anyone reading this does want to invite us round, mine’s a black tea and Ant prefers coffee with one sugar. In 1995, though, on one hand, we were saying, ‘We’re glamorous pop stars – put our posters on your wall and throw different types of confectionery at us,’ and on the other hand we were saying, ‘Hey, we’re just like you, we’re a couple of normal blokes who happen to be on telly.’
While we were filming The Ant and Dec Show, we lived at the Olympia Hilton, and our time at that hotel taught us one thing: the BBC had more money than Telstar.
I remember one time, Rory Gibson, who you may remember as our co-star in Byker Grove and the third member of our The Doors-meets-The-Chippendales log-cabin triumph, came down from Newcastle with a mate of his.
This mate of Rory’s thought he might get hungry on the train, so he took precautions. He brought a plastic bag full of meat with him. I can still see him now, walking towards me carrying a sweaty white plastic bag full of sliced turkey, sausages and boiled ham. Judging by the amount of meat that was still in that bag, neither Rory nor his mate had got hungry on the train. Either that, or they’d both become vegetarians somewhere around Darlington.
But the meat was just the start of it. Once they’d seen the kind of diverse food and beverages on offer in the capital, they went mad – and invested in a loaf of bread and a block of cheese. I’m not sure how Dec pulled this one off, but Rory and his mate both ended up staying in my room on that trip. With three pairs of teenage socks in one place, it would have smelt of cheese either way, but a large block of Cheddar certainly didn’t help keep the McPartlin residence fragrant that day.
Me and Dec went off to the TV studio one morning and, against my better judgement, I left Rory and his mate in my room. Understandably, they weren’t keen on paying for a room-service breakfast at the Olympia Hilton – I think a bowl of cornflakes costs around £92 in most of those hotels – so they decided to improvise. Armed with the bread and cheese, they searched the room and discovered an iron and an ironing board in the cupboard. The next thing they did was insane and ingenious at the same time. They used the iron and its board to make cheese toasties. If only Dragon’s Den had been around then, I’m sure those two entrepreneurs would be millionaires by now. It was just a good job I didn’t have to do any ironing when I got back, although I did pity the businessman who next stayed in my room: I could just picture him trying to press his shirt with a souped-up Breville sandwich-maker.
The Ant and Dec Show went on air in April 1995 and went out every Tuesday on BBC1 for eight weeks. It did well in the ratings and even went on to win a Children’s BAFTA award, but most of that passed us by – we never saw the show go out, and we missed the BAFTAs. As soon as we’d finished the series, we had to get out there and convince people to buy our new single, ‘Stuck On U’, which, like convincing anyone to buy any of our singles, took absolutely ages.
It was while we were doing that promotion that we faced one of the biggest challenges of our entire career, something neither of us has ever forgotten.
We had our first fight.
Chapter 14
Whenever we’re interviewed, or whenever we meet new people, they always ask us the same question: ‘Have you two ever had a fight?’ Don’t get me wrong, they usually say hello and stuff first, it’s not like, ‘Nice to meet you, have you two ever had a fight?’, but it always comes up sooner or later, and it’s only right we tell you the full story. So strap yourself in, here goes.
We were in the middle of this whirlwind promotional tour (as we’ve established, there is no other kind) for ‘Stuck On U’, and we’d been booked to appear on one of the biggest music events of the year, if not the decade – GMTV’s Fun in the Sun, live from Torremolinos, with Anthea Turner. We arrived in the middle of a baking Spanish summer, expecting to do the usual full day of promotion, crossing our fingers there were no dance-music remixes involved. Then we were given a rare treat: Kim, our tour manager, told us we had the whole day to take in the local surroundings and do some sightseeing. ‘This is a great chance to immerse ourselves in the local culture and discover the real Spain,’ I thought, as I ordered two pints of Heineken in Terry’s Bar and Grill.
One drink led to six and suddenly it was ten o’clock at night and we were tucking into a plateful of the local delicacies– a full English breakfast, with chips. Once we’d finished our fry-ups, we went back to the hotel bar, where Kim joined us, to ‘keep an eye on things’, which, roughly translated, meant ‘make sure we didn’t get too drunk’. The night wasn’t getting any younger and, after a whole day of drinking in the sun, with a live performance on GMTV early the next morning, we did the sensible thing, and ordered some shots with our next round of beers.
It was practically dawn when I finally stood up and announced I was going to bed.
I slurred, ‘Where are you going?’ back at Dec, ignoring the fact he’d just told me and K
im exactly where he was going.
I told Ant I was going to bed, although I’d had so much to drink that it might have come out as ‘Boing to ged’, and started to head towards the lift.
I asked him why he was boing to ged. He told me we had to be up at 5 a.m., which, by this point, was probably about an hour and a half away, and then he walked off, turning his back on me. Something in me snapped. I followed him, with Kim right behind me.
‘Don’t you dare walk away from me when I’m talking to you,’ I shouted after him, and I got my wish – he turned round and started ranting at me by the lifts.
I’ve got no idea what it was about, but I do like a good rant when I’m drunk. I eventually finished, and then, right on time, the lift came, and us two and Kim got in it.
I turned to Dec and said, ‘If you’ve quite finished, I’d like to have my say.’ I started slurring something, and I think Dec’s response tells you a lot about him as a person.
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Page 12
