Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story

by Ant McPartlin

  Once we’d recorded the track, shot the video and done the bare minimum of promotion, there was just one thing left to worry about – the singles chart. It felt strange to be back in the world of record sales and chart positions, but we quickly got swept up in the excitement of the whole thing. Before we go on, a quick quiz question to see if you’ve been paying attention: can you remember what our highest chart position was as pop stars? And for a bonus point, which track was it? You give up, don’t you? It was ‘Rhumble’ and it was number nine.

  As ‘We’re on the Ball’ got more airplay and more press, we started to think we might eclipse our number-nine smash. Our imagination quickly ran away with us and we started to dream about having our first ever number one. We figured that it would sell plenty through sheer patriotism – after all, it was the official World Cup single, everyone had flags on their cars and in their windows, and football hysteria was sweeping the nation. Maybe, just maybe, that hysteria would have one other side effect: people wouldn’t be able to tell awful music from good music – and they’d buy our single.

  We were so convinced we’d top the chart that we both started planning to buy Music Week, the industry’s trade paper, and have it framed. The whole thing was very exciting. And then the news came through.

  Will Young, the winner of Pop Idol, and one of the most popular artists in the country, was releasing his second single, that cover of ‘Light My Fire’ that had done so much to win him the show. It was a dead cert to be number one and, in that moment, our dreams went up in smoke. Smoke that came from Will Young lighting his fire.

  We ended up charting at number three, with Will Young at number one and Ant’s old friend from the Brits, Eminem, at number two. We’d tried acting and we’d tried singing, and the results were clear – get back to doing what we did best. It was time for some more messing about.

  Chapter 28

  Our next project can be summed up in three words, three words that in 2002 were very unfashionable.

  ‘Turquoise shell suit’?

  Saturday-night telly. Back then, in the olden days of the early twenty-first century, there was a lot of talk about Saturday-night telly – and that talk was about it becoming extinct – like dodos, or white dog poo. Admittedly, Pop Idol had been a big hit, but that was the exception that proved the rule. A lot of people thought that the internet, multichannel TV and DVDs meant there was no place for big entertainment shows. They thought it was no longer possible to make a big, ambitious Saturday-night show that the whole family would sit around and watch together, so we did the obvious thing – we made a big Saturday-night show for the whole family to sit around and watch together. Or at least we hoped they would.

  When it came to developing a new show – ‘developing’, incidentally, is another one of those fancy TV terms, this time for ‘coming up with a whole load of ideas in the hope that one of them sticks’ – by far the best idea was something that came from Granada Entertainment. When we heard it, we knew straight away that this was the programme we wanted to do. The main strand of the show was that we would give away the products that featured in adverts. It’s very simple, and it had never been done before – people play a gameshow to win the stuff that’s advertised on the telly.

  It was also – and this is always a bonus for anything on ITV – the show the BBC couldn’t make because, as the TV experts among you will have noted, the BBC don’t show any adverts.

  In case you hadn’t guessed by now, this was the show that became Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, which has gone on to run, at the last count, for nine series. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Nine series, and we still haven’t collapsed from a heart attack with all the running around we do on set.

  We took this idea and, with the help of some key personnel, or clever telly people, built a show round it. This was the zoo show we’d been waiting years to make, and me and Ant worked so hard to get it right. Along with Duncan Gray, the show’s executive producer, Nigel Hall, the producer of the first series, Siobhan Greene, the development producer who helped put the show together, and Leon Wilde, who was part development and part producer, we came up with a collection of mini-formats that formed the basis of Saturday Night Takeaway.

  We also brought in a director who has been stuck with us ever since – Chris Power. As well as directing Takeaway, he also does I’m a Celebrity… Our relationship with Chris is probably best summed up by us two, about five minutes before a live TV show, saying to him, ‘Can we just change this massive thing that’s really complicated into another massive thing that’s even more complicated?’ and him, miraculously, saying, ‘Yeah, all right,’ no matter what it is. Those kind of skills means he’s the perfect director for a show like Takeaway because, from the first script on a Tuesday to the actual show on a Saturday, it’s like Madonna – it never stops changing.

  We wanted to make each show an ‘event’, a special piece of live telly, and along with the production team, we worked very hard to put as much different stuff into the show as possible. This meant that as well as Win the Ads, there were also items like Jim Didn’t Fix It, where we’d surprise someone in our audience who’d written a letter to Jimmy Saville as a child and then help them realize their ambitions as an adult. For this poor member of the audience, the whole thing could be very embarrassing. It’s one thing wanting to dance with overweight dance troupe the Roly Polys when you’re a kid in the eighties, but doing it twenty years later as an adult on live TV is a very different kettle of fish.

  This was also the beginning of a fundamental element of Takeaway – surprising members of the audience. And, let me assure you, these surprises are planned with military precision, by a brilliant and very dedicated team. They know everything about the people in our audience. Put it this way, if Bin Laden had written to Jim’ll Fix It, they’d find out, track him down and, before he knew what had hit him, he’d be singing wth Chas ’n’ Dave live in the studio. We also littered the show with sketches, monologues, star guests, prize giveaways and something called Banged up with Beadle, which was a mini reality show where, every week, a member of the public would spend seven days living in a naval fort just off the coast off Portsmouth with the late, great TV prankster, Jeremy Beadle.

  Hosting an episode of Saturday Night Takeaway is the biggest buzz on telly. There are so many different things going on in the show, so much to remember and so many different roles for us to play, it’s like a rollercoaster – it’s a huge thrill and, once it starts, you can’t get off. We’re live on air for seventy-five minutes, so you have to see the journey through, no matter what twists and turns it takes.

  Takeaway could also be described as a circus show, because it’s got all the elements you’d find under the big top: excitement, jeopardy, danger and comedy. At least I think that’s why it’s called a circus show – either that or it’s because it’s got a pair of clowns hosting it.

  Every show starts with us two at the top of the studio stairs, surrounded by the audience within the studio, then we run down those stairs and on to the stage. Even the way we handle that tells you a lot about us. We might be about to do a live TV show, but I like to shake hands with everyone on the way down the stairs – it’s a lovely thing to do with the wonderful people who’ve made the effort to come and be there.

  Once a show-off, always a show-off. He milks every single second of it – he’s practically kissing babies on the way down those stairs. I, on the other hand, don’t really shake anyone’s hand – I’m deep in concentration and firmly focused on one thing and one thing only.

  Not tripping over and falling down the stairs?

  Exactly. When you’re as clumsy as I am, you could lose your footing at any minute. So if you do ever find yourself in the audience for Takeaway and I don’t stop on the way down the stairs, don’t take it personally, I’m just trying not to break my neck.

  It’s live, exciting, seat-of-the-pants telly, and that’s why we love doing it. We love doing the other programmes too, but Takeawa
y is our baby. And I’m not just saying that because it requires constant attention, keeps us awake at night and often makes a mess of our clothes, it’s the show we love doing the most, because it’s constantly challenged us as performers, from stitching up Simon Cowell to working with two eight-year-old children that we christened Little Ant and Dec.

  We’d completed the first series, but ITV had another show they wanted us to do – it would be live on air less than a month after we’d finished giving away the adverts, and it was the most insane TV show we’d ever been pitched.

  Chapter 29

  Tony Blackburn, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Christine Hamilton, Nell McAndrew, Rhona Cameron, Darren Day, Nigel Benn and Uri Geller.

  I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!, or the ‘new show that’s set in the jungle’, was the latest part of our golden-handcuffs deal with ITV, and it was pitched to us at the James Grant offices by Richard Cowles and Natalka Znak, the executive producers. From the moment they arrived, you could tell they meant business, because they brought pictures of rainforests with them. Even as they were explaining the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about the title and how long and strange it sounded.

  We listened intently to the idea, and shot each other a few sideways glances as they explained how eight celebrities would live together in a tiny camp in the middle of a rainforest for two weeks. We would broadcast a show every morning, live from Australia, at around 7 a.m., and the public would control what happened with phone-voting. The celebrities would have to win their own food, wash their own clothes, and there were cameras there to capture their every move. After the meeting, I was slightly keener than Ant, although we were both very interested. I just remember saying to him, ‘We’ve got to do this because, if it works, it’ll be brilliant and, if someone else does it and it’s a big hit, we’ll be gutted.’

  But I just kept thinking, ‘It sounds stupid – and that title’s far too long.’

  Eventually, we signed the contract, which was really long – mainly because it kept mentioning the title of the show – and flew out for the first series to Mission Beach, Queensland, with Ali Astall, our artist manager. We didn’t have a clue what to expect. We were picked up from the airport by an Australian driver who spent the entire journey to the hotel telling us about spiders the size of dinner plates, deadly snakes and generally trying to scare the pants off us. Over the years, we’ve realized that scaring the English is a national pastime for the Australians, and this driver seemed to be some sort of national champion.

  It wasn’t hard either, because I hate spiders, absolutely hate them.

  We made it to Mission Beach to find a lovely big hotel that all the crew were staying in and, after a long flight, we were looking forward to checking in and chilling out. But we were informed that our accommodation was three miles down the road; we’d been booked to stay in a smaller, more private and intimate location. It was a small eco-hotel that was run by a gay couple called ‘Gary and Barry’ – at least, we think that was their names: it’s what we christened them anyway.

  As we wandered from room to room, I couldn’t help but notice there were what I’ll politely call ‘erotic statues’ everywhere, the showers were outside and, most terrifyingly of all, there was no telly in any of the rooms. The whole place was like a hippy, sexy haven and two things we aren’t is hippies or sexy. Natalka, the executive producer and general all-round guvnor of I’m a Celebrity …, turned up at Gary and Barry’s to say hello, and when she asked us if there was anything we needed, we said, ‘Yes – a new hotel.’ We agreed to move to the crew hotel, climbed into the car and were just pulling away from the front door when I realized something important was missing. Dec.

  I’d nipped to the loo and, when I got back, the place was deserted – apart from Gary and Barry, who were enjoying a pot of herbal tea while polishing their sex statues. And no, that wasn’t a euphemism, before you ask.

  When we arrived at the big hotel, we had the first of several thousand surreal experiences we’d face over the next few weeks. We bumped into Keith ‘Cheggers Plays Pop’ Chegwin. Every year on I’m a Celebrity…, they fly stand-ins out in case any of the cast get ill or realize what they’re getting themselves into and, in series one, Cheggers was that stand-in. One thing about Cheggers is that he’s a very heavy smoker and, when we ran into him, he’d just got off the twenty-four-hour flight from London. To combat his cigarette cravings on the plane, he’d come up with a carefully thought-out plan – he would wear nicotine patches, chew nicotine gum and drink copious amounts of Coke.

  ‘Cheggers drinks pop’ – ha!

  All of this meant that, when we saw him, he was completely wired. He was also keen on showing us some of the home-video footage he’d already taken around the hotel. A lot of animals would wander freely around the grounds because, well, because they could, and because that’s the sort of stuff that goes on in Australia. One of the most notorious animals that did this was the cassowary – a kind of giant ostrich-meets-emu-meets-turkey thing that featured heavily in Cheggers’ home video.

  The Aussies had already put the fear of God into us about these deadly birds, warning us that, given half the chance, they’d ‘rip your gizzards out’. We couldn’t believe they would just walk around the hotel – I think one of them even tried to check in at one point. Apparently, they’d just come down from Gary and Barry’s and weren’t too keen on the sex statues. The thing about these birds, though, is that they’re incredibly stupid. So stupid, in fact, they will attack their own reflection. When we bumped into Cheggers, he had just finished filming a cassowary attacking its own reflection in a car door. So there we were, jetlagged, standing in our second hotel of the day with wired Children’s TV legend Keith Chegwin showing us home-video footage of a giant bird attacking its own reflection.

  And after that, things just got weirder.

  There was so much wildlife in that hotel; it was as if we really were doing a zoo show. There were birds, snakes – Ant even found a spider in his shower.

  I didn’t shower for two days. I’m not ashamed to admit it.

  We also both found small, brown lizards in our rooms. We were reliably informed that they were called gekkos. On one hand, they were good, because they ate the mosquitoes, but the down side is they let out giant, bloodcurdling shrieks in the middle of the night, which as you can imagine, can be ever so slightly inconvenient, especially when you’ve got a large dose of jet lag. Fortunately, the lizard I was sharing my room with disappeared after a day or so.

  I didn’t have such good luck – mine stayed in my room for a whole week. I christened him Michael – Michael Gekko – get it? It’s a kind of lizard-meets-Beppe from EastEnders pun… we’ve all done them, haven’t we? Every morning, conversations between me and Dec would go like this:

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘Morning. How’s Michael Gekko? Did he sleep all right?’

  ‘Not so good – he had a bit of a rough night.’

  ‘Oh well, give him my love.’

  It was hilarious, but that might have been the jet lag.

  After days of reptile-based comedy, the show actually started. Getting it on air was a miracle in itself – the format, the trials and the scripts were all constantly changing as we, and the production team, found our feet. We made sure we had a lot of input into the scripts and the overall feel of the show, after hosting Friends Like These and Pop Idol, we knew how important it was for the show to have its own language – and we thought it would benefit from having catchphrases. The long and ridiculous title of the show somehow stuck, and became one of those catchphrases. Screaming I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Heeeeerreeee!’ from the bridge at the beginning was an idea we had during rehearsals, and it helped give the whole show a bit of an identity. It also meant we got a lovely view of the rainforest first thing in the morning. Which was nice.

  And, by the way, for your handy cut-out-and-keep guide to a typical day in the life for Dec and me on I’m a Celebrity…, you can turn to
that nice glossy photo section.

  Before the first series aired, the press had been scathing, calling it ‘I’m a Z-Lister… Get Me out of Here!’, and other hilarious headlines. Some people were even speculating that the whole thing was fake and we weren’t in Australia at all. My sister Moyra heard a phone-in on a radio show where a caller said, ‘I’ve just seen Dec driving down the M1 in his Porsche.’ It was absolute rubbish. I haven’t got a Porsche.