One of the ways we did that was through the Pokéfight. David Staite, our producer, had come up with it, and it was written up by, appropriately enough, our writer, Dean Wilkinson. It involved me and Dec dressing up as Pokémon characters and having a fight. Sounds funny already, doesn’t it? What do you mean, ‘No, not at all’?
Normally, with any sketch we do, we have a lot of input but, with this one, we had to take a leap of faith, because we had no idea what Pokémon was or how it worked. Taking a leap of faith on telly is hard enough, but when you’re taking that leap dressed in a wig and talking in a cartoon character’s voice, it’s ten times harder.
That morning, we rehearsed it in front of the crew, who were always a good barometer of whether a sketch was funny or not. The Pokéfight went down like a lead balloon. Even worse, it was too late to change anything about it. I remember coming back after the ad break, getting ready to pokéfight live, fearing the worst, and Sticky, our floor manager, said, ‘Right, everyone, here we go: 10–9–8–7…’ then he stopped mid-count, turned to me and Dec and said, ‘You’re going to die!’, then carried on with “6–5–4–3–2–1.’ Despite the crew’s reaction, and Sticky’s scaremongering, the Pokéfight went on to become a massively popular part of sm:tv.
As well as Pokémon, we also had a cartoon called Digimon, which was a Pokémon spin-off. Really, don’t ask. After the closing credits of one particular episode, it was my turn to back-reference it, which isn’t easy if you’ve never watched a single episode. In the end, I went for the safe option: ‘More Digimon next week. Ah, I love Digimon.’ Quick as a flash, Cat turned to me with a glint in her eye and a cheeky smile and said, ‘Do you? Which one’s your favourite?’ I obviously didn’t have a clue – I couldn’t even take a guess at a name – so I replied: ‘What?’ Cat calmly repeated, ‘I said, who’s your favourite Digimon character?’ I just thought, ‘You cheeky bitch,’ while stuttering, ‘Oh, I love them all.’
We all loved winding each other up and she’d got me a treat. Cheeky bitch.
We did our fair share of stitching Cat up too. If there was ever a big competition that involved reading out lengthy questions, rules and regulations, we’d always make Cat do it. I think the moment she rumbled us was after a particularly laborious read for a Pocahontas On Ice competition. She shouted, ‘How come I always get this shit to do?’
Slowly, thanks to our clever plan of making a show that actually appealed to children, the ratings started to improve. In the spring, Zoe and Jamie announced they’d be quitting Live & Kicking at the end of the current series and, once that happened, we really started to believe we could win the battle against the Beeb. A few months later, Conor ran into the office shouting, ‘We’ve done it, we’ve beaten them!’
After months of slogging our guts out, we were beating Live & Kicking in what TV bosses would call the ‘key demographic’ – kids aged between five and fifteen. This was huge – audience research told us that kids that age were in charge of the remote control on Saturday mornings, and the received wisdom was that if we got them watching, then the next age group – the sixteen to thirty-fours – would follow. I assume because they couldn’t find the remote, but we didn’t care why, we just wanted people to watch our show.
By the time the summer came around, Live & Kicking had gone off air and been replaced by a show called Fully Booked. We were now winning every week, and we never looked back. All our hard work was starting to pay off – we’d work on the show from Tuesday to Saturday every single week and it was a great buzz when that commitment was rewarded with victory in the ratings battle.
The sketches we did improved, our performances and our ideas for the show got better, and we still had Dean Wilkinson as our main writer. As Dean was such a big, naughty kid, sm:tv was the perfect show for him. He had a childish and mischievous sense of humour that made Saturday mornings the perfect showcase for his talents.
Looking back now, there are so many parts of that show that we both genuinely loved doing – Splattoon, All Hands on Dec, Fart Attack with Neil Pumpcannon, Captain Justice, Dec Says, Eat My Goal, the Postbag dance. One of the best-loved was Wonkey Donkey, an idea that came from Richard Preddy and Gary Howe, two of the other writers. Wonkey Donkey couldn’t have been simpler – there was a different toy animal on a plinth every week, and we’d have made up a two-word rhyme, one word the animal and the other one that rhymed with it – for instance, slow crow, or sly fly – and the kids had to call in and guess which two words described the animal.
What really made it work was Dec acting like a furious older brother when the kids got it wrong – teasing them and insulting them. That was something we’d brought with us from The Ant and Dec Show on the BBC – not talking down to the kids. This time, though, we stopped short of shaving their heads – we’d learnt our lesson with that one.
The biggest and most fondly remembered part of sm:tv was surely our weekly sketch Chums. The American sitcom Friends was huge at the time and Chums started out as a rip-off or, as telly people say, a spoof. The idea was that the three of us lived in a flat together. Dec was always trying to get together with Cat, and the whole thing was played like a farce, so there’d constantly be people coming in and out of doors and getting caught doing things they shouldn’t be. We also did the whole thing live, which was unusual for what was essentially a mini-sitcom. Of course, the whole show was live, but Chums was so much more complicated than anything else we did. It had pop stars, sportsmen and women and comedians doing lots of acting and learning big chunks of script – all of which meant we’d often crack up laughing in the middle of scenes.
It quickly became the highlight of the week. In many ways, it summed up sm:tv at its best – it was big and daft and had plenty of punch-ups and pratfalls, but it was also full of double entendres, which had become a staple part of our act. That kind of thing appealed to our older viewers, and it was on around eleven o’clock in the morning, which meant they were actually awake, which is always a good quality in any audience. What really made it, apart from our incredibly realistic performances in the roles of ‘Ant’ and ‘Dec’, was the celebrity guests.
As Chums went on, anyone who was anyone appeared on it, people like Mariah Carey, Kylie Minogue, Sting, Tom Jones, the Spice Girls, Jamiroquai and Jerry Springer (who of course got his own special Jerry Springer Show-style episode) and, after a while, people were approaching us and asking to be in it. We bumped into the cast of Cold Feet at an ITV summer party, and they all wanted to be part of it. It was incredible – some of the finest performers from one of ITV’s best ever shows… were talking to the cast of Cold Feet. Chums became the place to be seen on telly. Well, on kids’ telly… on Saturday morning… for ten minutes, but it was very popular.
By the time we got to August 1999 and the end of our first year on the air, the ratings had gone up enough for us to turn down another panto, and ITV commissioned another twelve months of the show. All of this was down to lots of different factors: an incredible amount of hard work from a very dedicated production team (I hope you’re all reading) and a huge amount of support from ITV; the lessons we’d learnt from panto; and the great relationship we had with Cat. Oh, and Zoe and Jamie’s retirement. After each show, me, Dec and Cat would all go out together, and we were as good mates off screen as we were on it.
All of this meant we were experiencing a strange sensation, something we’d never had throughout our time as pop stars.
We were enjoying what we did for a living. We were almost – whisper it – proud of our career.
I know, weird, isn’t it?
Chapter 20
With sm:tv live and cd:uk finally working and people actually watching it, the producers made a move that, to be perfectly honest, was risky and brave. They started putting some more of our ideas on the show. One of the first examples of this was an item that involved me, Dec, eleven simple questions and an unsuspecting schoolkid. The two of us were in the middle of our regular ideas meeting – I think Dec was
just coming back from the Gents and I was getting some pork scratchings and a couple of pints – when we came up with it. I said to Dec I’d like to take on kids in a proper general-knowledge, question-and-answer quiz. I was never going to make University Challenge, so I thought if I went up against kids, there was a chance I might actually win. I was also genuinely intrigued to see who knew more – the kids or me. Anyone who knew me at the time would have simply said, ‘The kids – next question,’ but I had faith in myself. In the pub that night, we devised a mini-gameshow that became a new feature on sm:tv. I’d put myself forward as the king of common knowledge, by which I mean kids’ general knowledge – cartoons, pop music and computer games – not What’s the capital of Peru?-type stuff. It’s Lima, in case you’re wondering.
Google?
Yep. The kids would ask me ten questions and, for every one I got wrong, they’d win a prize. At the end, they could gamble their prizes on asking me a killer question. If I got that wrong, they’d win the star prize, which was usually a games console. Like the men who came up with it, the format was very, very simple.
The twist, if you like, was that if Ant got the killer question right, which he very occasionally did, the kids won absolutely nothing, and he would gloat over them, parading around in his crown and king’s robes. Oh yeah, we didn’t mention that, as the ‘king’ of general knowledge, Ant would wear a crown and a robe.
I’ve still got that crown at home. Not that I ever parade around in it behind closed doors and pretend I’m a real king or anything.
We called the game Challenge Ant and, when we first told Conor about the idea, he said, ‘But if they lose, you give the kids something at the end, right? A consolation prize?’ We told him they wouldn’t get anything, and he said, ‘People don’t do that to kids.’ Our reply was ‘Exactly.’ So, if the kids beat Ant, which of course they often did…
What do you mean, ‘of course’?
If they beat Ant, they got to sing, ‘You’re thick, you’re thick, you’re thick, you’re thick,’ to him, and they loved that. In fact, the only person who loved it more than the kids was me.
I, on the other hand, wasn’t amused – I took the whole thing very seriously.
My weak point was Harry Potter and, before long, the kids got wise, and questions on Harry Potter became the easy way to score points in Challenge Ant. Whenever they came up, I would choose one of a set of four words, even though I had no idea what they meant – they were ‘Ron Weasley’, ‘Dumbledore’ or ‘Hagrid’.
That was fine when the questions were about Harry Potter, but slightly embarrassing when he had to name a female member of Steps.
The item was an immediate hit and, as sm:tv became more successful, we even had celebrities doing it. Alan Shearer, Victoria Beckham, Kevin Keegan and Michael Owen all had a go, and even Sarha, who must’ve been about twenty-three at the time, challenged me. Clare and Lisa had a pop too and, even worse, they won. In fact, I think I still owe them a skiing holiday, but let’s not dwell on that. What was so great was that it was a daft idea we’d had in the pub and now it was on the telly and the audience loved it.
As well as playing games with celebrities and our girlfriends, something else happened to us when sm:tv became the must-see Saturday-morning show, something we’d never encountered in the whole of our career. We started getting a little bit of respect from grown-ups – male grown-ups, what’s more. As ex-pop stars and kids’ TV presenters, our fan base had always been made up of girls and young children. As you’ll remember from earlier on in the book, blokes had always thought of us as, well, a variety of things – just trust me when I tell you none of them are worth printing.
One incident around this time summed up the way men started to not completely hate us. We were in a pub in Chiswick one night when a bloke came up to us and asked us if we remembered a terrible moment we’d experienced as pop stars. We told him this could take hours, he’d have to be more specific. This bloke told us it involved two lads in Fulham who’d thrown a chair at our car and called us a pair of wankers.
I actually remembered the incident. At the time, I thought, ‘Why does this lad hate us so much?’ Even though it came with the territory, and the chair-throwing was just a bigger, wooden version of the ashtrays, ice cubes and saliva that had been aimed at us in the past, it was still upsetting. One of the lads in particular just looked so angry. His face was contorted with rage, and we couldn’t believe that, even taking our music into account, the sight of us just driving past had made someone so furious.
This guy we were talking to in the pub had a confession to make – it was him who’d thrown the chair, and he wanted to apologize. As he confessed, we both reacted in exactly the same way – by immediately checking there weren’t any empty chairs within grabbing distance. But he was completely genuine – he said he was really ashamed of what had happened when we were PJ and Duncan. ‘Join the club’ was our reply. He was determined to set the record straight. He’d seen us on sm:tv and thought we were, in his words, ‘all right blokes’.
Suddenly the world had become a nicer place for us. Sometimes, blokes would even offer to buy us a pint. At long last, we were showing people our real personalities rather than a sugar-coated pop version of who we were, and they liked us.
As well as the man in the street, there was another section of the population who we suddenly seemed popular with – TV executives. Now that the show was doing well, ITV would invite us to corporate events, the first of which was the advertisers’ autumn launch. This is where ITV announces its new programmes to the advertisers and agencies who spend serious money advertising their product on the channel. It’s a major event for any commercial broadcaster. We were wheeled out, along with some of ITV’s biggest names, to appear.
It was being held at a theatre in the west end of London and, when we arrived, we headed upstairs to a plush room where all the talent were being fed and watered. Before we even got in there, we heard the famous ‘bongs’ of News At Ten, which meant Sir Trevor McDonald was there. Des Lynam was also in attendance and, not long after us, Chris Tarrant arrived. Back then, Chris was hosting Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, which we loved – and liked to think of as similar to Challenge Ant, but with a bit more at stake. We’d met Chris before, and he always had a laugh with us, by which I mean a laugh at us. He’d gone from Tiswas on Saturday mornings to prime time and was a bit of a hero of ours. He’d come straight from his Capital Radio breakfast show, and he walked in, put down his tan leather briefcase and greeted us with a ‘Hello, you talentless little tossers.’
He didn’t mean it, but you should’ve heard what he called Sir Trevor McDonald. One by one, these titans of telly went downstairs to the main stage to do their bit for the advertisers and, after Chris went down, we were left alone in the room. It seemed to take ages to get to our bit, and we began to get slightly bored. As part of hospitality, there was tea, coffee, fruit, pastries and an enormous plate of muffins in the room, which Ant started tucking into.
I kicked off with a blueberry one but, after one bite, I wasn’t impressed, so I picked up another. Banana. Still wasn’t doing it for me, so I moved on to apple and cinnamon. I took one bite of that and realized that, by now, I was quite full and, even worse, I was stuck with three half-eaten muffins, so I decided to put them back on the plate.
‘You can’t do that,’ I told him. ‘Des Lynam and David Jason’ll be back any minute – they don’t want to see your half-eaten-muffin mountain.’
Suddenly, I had a brainwave, I put them into Chris Tarrant’s briefcase. Actually, I’m not sure ‘brainwave’ is exactly the right word… We giggled about it for a bit, and fairly quickly went back to being bored and waiting for our turn. Eventually, the sound men arrived, mic’d us up, and we got ready to do our bit. Chris had finished his speech, made his way back upstairs and was now shooting the breeze with Sir Trevor and Des, who’d also finished. We were just leaving the room when we heard the unmistakable tones of Tarrant cry out, ‘Who p
ut these muffins in my briefcase?’
We’ll never know if that question was followed by four possible answers ‘Was it (a) Des Lynam (b) Sir Trevor McDonald (c) David Jason or (d) Ant and Dec?’ We quickly said, ‘We’re on,’ and ran towards the stage. As we were leaving the room, we could hear Chris asking if that was our final answer, but we didn’t bother looking back.
We did a lot of those kind of events for ITV but, at the time, didn’t really appear on other TV shows. We figured that we were on air every Saturday for three hours and thought we may be in danger of over-exposure, so we turned down most invitations. One that we did accept, though, was an appearance on TFI Friday on Channel 4. TFI was edgy and cool, and Chris Evans was someone whose work we really admired. Despite our admiration, though, we also had some issues with Chris – when we were making the highly forgettable Ant and Dec Unzipped for Channel 4, he had been critical of the show – so the invitation to appear on TFI Friday left us unsure. We thought maybe he was going to stitch us up.
We couldn’t have been more wrong. As soon as we arrived at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, he thanked us for coming and told us to come into his dressing room; he said all the others were crap, and we should share his. And the show itself couldn’t have gone better – the crowd gave us a great reception, and Chris was really complimentary about us and sm:tv.
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Page 19