Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story

by Ant McPartlin

  In the vicious, no-holds-barred battleground of Saturday-morning kids’ TV, we were slayed – and the people doing the slaying were the hosts of BBC1’s Live & Kicking, Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston. Back then, the BBC on Saturday mornings was like Godzilla – a ruthless beast that crushed anything that got in its way. Looking back at the early days of our show, we were trying to be too clever and too cool for our own good which, of course, in the eyes of the kids, made us not very cool and not very clever. We’d spend the whole two hours of sm:tv building up to cd:uk and showing ‘exciting’ things that were coming up later on in our super-cool music show. What that essentially involved was filming pop stars getting in and out of their cars when they arrived at the studio. We may as well have called the show ‘Celebrity Taxi Rank’.

  One of the many things we hadn’t realized was how much the audience changes through the course of a morning. At 9.30, when your viewers are all young kids, you’ve got to show cartoons, do big, daft things and make a fool of yourself – but we were making fools of ourselves in completely the wrong way: by not understanding our audience.

  Throughout the autumn of 1998, the BBC trounced us in the ratings. It was really difficult coming to work and hearing, week after week, that we were coming second in a race with only two runners. I don’t mind telling you, I started thinking shelf-stacking might be back on the agenda. The BBC had traditionally dominated Saturday morning television and, with us at the helm, it didn’t look like that was going to change any time soon. There was a very real danger that, if the ratings and the show didn’t get better, then ITV would cut its losses and cancel the series. It was also our company making the show, so we were failing in the boardroom as well as on the telly. If Alan Sugar had been in that boardroom, we would have been fired pretty sharpish. Thankfully for us, he was far too busy running a successful business empire to get involved with Saturday-morning telly.

  There was one thing and one thing only that saved us from getting cancelled in the first six months. That thing had a beard and a huge dollop of blind faith, and was called Nigel Pickard. Nigel was tremendously supportive of the show. He must have been under pressure from his bosses to cancel us, and it would have been very easy for him to buckle, but he stuck to his guns.

  Years later, Nigel became Director of Programmes at ITV, which meant he was in charge of Saturday Night Takeaway and I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!, and we had a great relationship with him then as well. To put all of that another way: thanks Nigel, we owe you big time.

  Christmas approached fast, and the show was still dying on its arse. Then something happened that changed everything. We didn’t hire new people, we didn’t change our style, we did something which, although we didn’t know it at the time, would have an enormous impact on the show.

  We did pantomime.

  Earlier in the year, when we’d been in that showbiz wilderness, we’d signed up to appear in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves at the Sunder-land Empire – I’ll leave you to make your own jokes about which dwarves we were. Our co-star, playing the part of Snow White, was a beautiful, talented and charismatic actress who had a complete and utter loser of a boyfriend. Her name was Clare Buckfield.

  Very funny.

  Thanks, Grumpy – or were you Dopey? I can never remember…

  That’s enough now.

  Oh no it isn’t.

  Don’t start all that again.

  When we’d agreed to do the panto, we didn’t know that, by the time it came around, we’d be hosting our very own unsuccessful Saturday-morning show, but we were professionals, we’d made a commitment and we were determined to honour it. Plus, we thought sm:tv could get cancelled any day so, for all we knew, this could be our last paid work for a while.

  Doing Snow White and sm:tv at the same time made for a hectic schedule. We’d do two pantos a day, Monday to Thursday, then after the Thursday evening, drive through the night from Sunderland to London and spend all day Friday rehearsing sm:tv. On a Saturday morning we’d do the live TV show and, the second it finished, at 12.30, we’d leave the studio on the back of a taxibike and race to Battersea heliport in South London. There, we’d get a helicopter to Gatwick, a flight from Gatwick to Newcastle, then a car from Newcastle to Sunderland. Once we were in the car, we’d get into our costumes, arrive at the theatre with seconds to spare and walk on stage three hours after we’d left London. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. Despite the chaos, we made every single one of those Saturday matinees – not that audiences ever knew we’d even been on telly that morning. Most of them were far too busy watching Live & Kicking.

  As well as us two and Clare, the panto also starred our old sparring partner from Byker Grove Billy Fane. He had written and directed the panto, and he was always on standby in case we didn’t make it in time – although I never quite worked out how he would have managed to portray both of Dame Dolly Doughnut’s nephews. Yes, that’s right, I said Dame Dolly Doughnut’s nephews – these were parts so demanding, so intensely theatrical that I can only assume Daniel Day Lewis and Anthony Hopkins were busy.

  Like all pantos, this one ran through Christmas and into the New Year, which meant I spent Christmas with Clare. It was wonderful. She bought me a great present that year – a brand-new stereo, which came in various separate parts, or, as they were called back then, ‘separates’. There was a radio, a tape player, a CD player, an amp and a set of speakers. (For younger readers, stereos were complicated affairs in the days before iPods.) Anyway, Clare had ordered the stereo from a shop in the centre of Newcastle but, when it came to collecting it, she realized she couldn’t manage it on her own. She couldn’t ask me for help – it would have spoiled the surprise – and Ant was busy making sure he didn’t get roped into carrying a stereo round Newcastle.

  That’s right, I was.

  In the end, Clare did the sensible thing and enlisted the help of the only other people she knew were available – the dwarves from the panto. So Clare, or Snow White, as she was known to our audiences, turned up on the main shopping street in Newcastle with a band of dwarves in tow, to collect the stereo. I never did find out if they sang ‘Hi-ho’ all the way there and back, but I’d like to think they did.

  Saturday mornings may not have been going well, but the pantomime was breaking box-office records. The shows were packed out, and the audiences were loving it.

  At the end of every performance, we’d do the song sheet, where we’d get kids from the audience up on stage to help with a song – a cover of the Fat Les classic, ‘Vindaloo’. During the song, and for a few minutes afterwards, we’d have a chat, a laugh and a joke on stage with the kids. After a few shows of talking to different groups of kids, the penny suddenly dropped: they were our audience for Saturday mornings –and, on our TV show, we just weren’t talking to them properly. We were talking to twenty-two-year-olds with hangovers, not these kids.

  When you’re face to face with kids, day after day, you realize exactly what makes them laugh – and what makes them laugh is fart noises, toilet humour and anything big, silly and visual. They didn’t seem too interested in the latest Jamiroquai B-side. We’d always prided ourselves on knowing who our audience is and understanding what it wants but, this time, we’d got it completely wrong.

  When we went back to the TV show after Christmas, we talked to the producers and told them we needed to change everything. We introduced a game called Giant Grabbit, where we hoisted kids into a giant pit of balls to scramble for prizes. We also showed lots of episodes of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and, more importantly, engaged with it. We did sketches where I was obsessed with Sabrina and wrote her love poems. We did as much as we could around this crazy teenage witch, because we knew that was what the kids would change channels to see.

  Just as the seven dwarves had saved Snow White from the clutches of the evil queen, so the panto had saved Dame Dolly Doughnut’s nephews from being killed off by the evil Live & Kicking. And, like all the best stories, this one would have a f
airytale ending.

  The ratings started to pick up a bit, that’s what Ant’s trying to say – and more kids started watching. We were slowly but surely starting to get the hang of Saturday-morning telly.

  Chapter 19

  It was at the start of 1999 that we made another huge and very, very difficult decision – to part company with our manager Dave Holly. He’d always said that, if ever we felt we’d outgrown him, to just tell him, and we both felt the time had come.

  It was a very tough decision, and not one we took lightly. We were very fond of Dave, his assistant Margaret and his family, and we’ll never forget what he did for us. He had a huge input into the first ten years of our careers, and we’ll always appreciate that.

  After we’d made the break from Dave, we started looking for new management. The first meeting we had was at a company called James Grant Management, which was run by Peter Powell, the former Radio 1 DJ, and his business partner, Russ Lindsay. It was a good meeting, even if Pete did keep giving us traffic news and the highest chart climbers of the week, but I suppose old habits die hard. The company had clients like Zoe ‘the enemy’ Ball and Philip ‘not the enemy at all’ Schofield, and a track record for taking presenters from Saturday mornings to prime-time TV. Even though sm:tv wasn’t exactly setting the world alight, we knew that was exactly the direction we wanted to go in. In that first meeting, we also met Paul Worsley and Darren Worsley, who are both from Bolton, about the same age but, despite their surname, strangely, not related.

  Pete, Russ, Paul and Darren explained they were looking for new, younger clients to represent, and they liked us as performers. Their company offered a full service to their clients and didn’t just represent them but took care of every aspect of their life. We nearly blew the whole thing when Dec asked if that included washing dishes and cooking beans on toast, but thankfully they didn’t hold that against us. At the end of the meeting, Pete said, ‘Well, I’m sure you’ve got loads of people to see, but we’d love to sign you, so let us know when you’ve seen everyone.’ We said, ‘Oh yes, we’ve got lots of people to see,’ and went on our merry way, but the truth was they were the only people we’d arranged to meet. Me and Dec were walking down the stairs of their office, when I whispered, ‘Shall we go with them?’

  ‘One step at a time,’ I said to him.

  I didn’t know if he meant the agency or the staircase. After all, I am very clumsy.

  We pretty much decided there and then to go with James Grant, and we had a moment of déjà vu. Matthew Robinson had told us about the Telstar offer on the stairs at Byker Grove, and here we were, making another big decision on the stairs. Even now, when we have to make our mind up about something, we go straight to the nearest staircase.

  We didn’t actually tell James Grant for a few days – after all, we might have gone upstairs for a coffee, but we weren’t going all the way on the first date. We led them on for another forty-eight hours or so and then signed – and we’ve been there ever since. Once we’d joined the agency, we were assigned an artist manager, Alison Astall, and, to this day, Ali is absolutely vital to everything we do. She knows the two of us better than anyone.

  Except my beautiful wife, of course.

  Of course. Ali is our Girl Friday. Although the truth is, she’s more like a girl Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And often Saturday and Sunday too. Ali takes care of everything – she’s in charge of our schedule, she comes to Australia with us for I’m a Celebrity… she even sorts out when we get our hair cut. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without Ali, our lives and our career would be total chaos.

  Things were beginning to fall into place. At the beginning of 1999, we also settled into our first ever houses. Thanks to the money from panto, and sm:tv being commissioned for fifty-two weeks, we knew that, even if the show was axed after a year, we’d be able to save up enough money to pay the mortgages for a while. We’d actually bought them in November, but because of the panto and Christmas at home, it didn’t feel like we moved in properly until the New Year. They were in Chiswick, in West London, and for the record, they were not next door to each other – that would be absolutely ridiculous. They were two doors away from each other. People have always teased us about living so close, but we’re best mates and there’s no point in living on the other side of town to each other. Just like Dec with his big family and cousins round the corner, and me with my Nanna and Granda living across the road, we both grew up in houses next to the most important people in our lives, and I suppose this is an extension of that. We never sat down and decided to live next door to each other, it’s just worked out that way, and that’s how we like it.

  There was about twenty paces between the two houses, which was great – it was almost like sharing a flat, but with houses, and this time, there was no toss for who got the big bedroom. Living right next to my best mate, I always had someone to talk to but, more importantly, I had somewhere I could open my tins, because for the first year I lived in my house, I didn’t have a tin opener. As you can tell, I wasn’t exactly quick to adapt to the demands of living on my own. I didn’t have any curtains for about six months, so I stuck together a load of flattened-out cardboard boxes with Sellotape and fashioned a makeshift blind. I was really proud of it.

  It would have taken less time to go and buy a blind than he spent making that one, but that didn’t occur to him.

  I remember getting back from the pub one night and Ant and me went home. I fancied a sandwich, so I got some ham and a packet of cherry tomatoes out of the fridge and then a knife out of the cutlery drawer. Due to having had a couple and to not being a domestic goddess, I decided to use the biggest knife I could find to cut the tiny little cherry tomatoes. The end result was that I missed the cherry tomato and the only thing I ended up slicing was the top of my thumb. It started pouring with blood and it wouldn’t stop. I’m not good with the sight of blood – it makes me feel very faint, almost as faint as the idea of cooking, in fact. I rang Ant, who came over with Lisa and bandaged me up.

  He was whiter than the slice of Mother’s Pride on his chopping board when we got there.

  Before long, and partly for my own safety, Clare was staying a lot of time at the house, Lisa was at Ant’s, and the four of us were spending loads of time together. Clare used to cook a Sunday dinner at mine, we’d watch videos at Ant’s, or go out for dinners in Chiswick together.

  Lisa and Clare always got on well, which made everything so easy – and they’re still very close friends now. Back then, it also meant me and Ant could go to the pub, watch the football and leave them in one of the houses together. They were usually very happy to get shot of us two and tuck into a bottle of wine.

  Lisa and Clare would always tease us for spending so much time together, but what they never seemed to notice was that, nine times out of ten, when we were hanging out together, they were hanging out together too. If I spent the weekend in Oxford with Lisa, where she’s from, and Dec went to Hertfordshire with Clare to see her family, when we got back, me and Dec would go for a pint on the Sunday night, and Clare and Lisa would say, ‘Are you happy you’re back with your little friend now?’ but, at the same time, they would be together having a girlie gossip, back with their ‘little friend’ too. It still annoys me now to think about it.

  I can see that – my little friend.

  The four of us were great together, though, and having our own houses also meant we could have lots of people round. Almost as soon as we moved to Chiswick, everyone started coming back to my house after a night out and, specifically, coming back to my kitchen. Don’t ask me why everyone liked to spend time in the kitchen, not the living room, but that kitchen had more drinking done in it than most pubs in London, so much so that we nicknamed it ‘The Vortex’, because once you got in there, time stood still. We’d get back from the pub after closing time, and the next thing you knew it was three o’clock in the morning.

  Years later, when Ant and Lisa moved out of that house, l
eaving that kitchen behind, it did wonders for my liver.

  Although there’s one thing I miss about The Vortex, which is Dec and Lisa doing drunken Michael Jackson dancing. I never got involved personally – I’m not really one of life’s dancers.

  Maybe we should enter Britain’s Got Talent next year, Lisa and me. What do you think?

  No comment.

  With a new home, new management and, thanks to panto, a newfound love of childish humour (okay, we’d always had the last one), we set about trying to make the only Saturday-morning show that kids would actually want to watch. Along with Dec’s love poems to Sabrina, we started to dress up as characters from Pokémon, the Japanese cartoon that kids everywhere loved in the late nineties. I still couldn’t really tell you a single thing about Pokémon, but boy did the kids love those little, er, thingies. This meant that, like the consummate professionals we are, we got very good at pretending we loved those thingies too.