Standing in the studio that morning, I thought to myself, ‘Look at this, look at what we’ve created, all from an idea we had in the flat in Fulham three years ago.’ At moments like that, I feel really lucky to do what I do, and I think it’s important to stop and savour them every now and then. I snapped out of it, though, put on some comedy eyes on springs and went to work.
The second memorable moment came in cd:uk and a section of the show called the People’s Choice. This was where viewers could vote for which one of three tracks they wanted played at the end of that morning’s show. After much persuasion, long discussions and a bit of blackmail, the producers talked us into making one of the three tracks a live performance of ‘Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble’. Despite the fact we hadn’t performed the track for at least three years, we weren’t too worried. The other two tracks in the vote were by Steps and Mel C – two of the most popular acts on cd:uk that week, so we thought it was pretty unlikely we’d have to dust down the old dance moves. Then David Staite and Phil Mount took us to one side and said, ‘It’s your show, and you’re being very foolish if you don’t think they’ll vote for you.’ We still didn’t believe them – after all, it was Steps’ ‘When I Said Goodbye’ and Mel C’s ‘I Turn to You’ versus a track that had got to number nine six years ago.
We got 86 per cent of the vote.
It looked like we would be wrecking the mics after all.
We’d gone through a period of being embarrassed and ashamed of our pop-star past. But this was a bit of a water-shed for us: it was the first time we’d publicly had a laugh about it, even though everyone else had been doing that for years. When it came to doing the track on cd:uk, it was actually really good fun, and it was amazing how quickly the dance moves and the lyrics came flooding back.
Even now, at every end-of-a-series wrap party for every TV show we do, the DJ plays it, and everyone tries to get us to do it. We did it for Phil Mount’s wedding a couple of years ago, and we once did it at a Saturday Night Takeaway party, but generally we try and leave it alone. So if you’re a DJ reading this and you ever play at any party we’re at, please don’t bring it. Trust us, it’s best for everyone.
So, with a hundred shows under our belts, the first year of a new century ended with one of the biggest decisions we’d ever had to take. It was a straight choice between two of the biggest and best-known institutions in Britain.
Would we have lunch in Burger King, or McDonald’s?
And after we’d worked that one out, we had to choose between ITV and the BBC – neither channel was happy with us making shows for the other one, and they both wanted to offer us an exclusive deal, so it was decision time.
Chapter 22
Relationships are difficult things at the best of times – and keeping two of them going at once is very tricky.
You’ve used that line before, haven’t you?
Despite the fact we were doing some of our very best messing about on ITV on Saturday mornings, we’d also done a second series of Friends Like These, and were still talking to the BBC about other ideas. We were very keen to do a ‘zoo’ show on Saturday nights – that’s not a show set in a zoo, by the way, although that’s not a bad idea. Stick it on the list, will you, Ant?
I like it – keep an eye out for that one next year, readers. This particular show consisted of lots of different items – games, sketches, challenges. I think that type of programme is called a zoo show because there are so many different things to see. Anyway, we really wanted to do one, and the BBC weren’t opposed to the idea, but they said we should sign an exclusive contract with them, bide our time and do more Friends Like These, and then maybe we could do our zoo show. ‘Maybe’ didn’t really do it for us and we had our reservations. We thought there were only so many friends, so many games and so many four-hour recordings we could put up with. The two of us and the BBC wanted different things in the immediate future, which meant we reached a stalemate.
We asked them for some time to think about it, left Television Centre, got in the car with Paul, our manager, and rang ITV. One hour later we were sat in a room at the Hempel Hotel in Central London with David Liddiment, the ITV Director of Programmes, and Claudia Rosencrantz, the Controller of Entertainment. We told them the BBC had offered us an exclusive deal that would mean leaving Saturday mornings, but it wasn’t to make the kind of shows we wanted to make. Right there and then, they offered us an exclusive deal. We would only make shows for ITV, we could keep doing sm:tv and test out stuff, including a Saturday-night zoo show, in prime time.
This was a dilemma – we had a successful Saturday-morning show on ITV and a successful Saturday-night show on the BBC, and we were going to have to give one of them up. We needed some time to think about it. We were still weighing up our options when Claudia used an expression I’ll never forget. In an effort to try and get a decision out of us, she said, ‘Well, boys, it’s time to shit or get off the pot.’ And I’m proud to say we took a big shit in the ITV pot and, metaphorically, we’ve both been sat there with our trousers round our ankles ever since.
As is the case with so many relationships, a few hours in a hotel room had taken things to the next level. We’ve never flirted with another channel since. Like most decisions we’ve made in our career, it wasn’t a grand plan we’d had from the beginning, we just dealt with it as and when it came along. The thing that was most unusual, though, was that there were no staircases involved. Although we did go and stand on the steps of the hotel fire escape for a bit, just for old times’ sake, before we gave them our verdict.
When it came to actually signing the ITV deal, we almost didn’t have time to put pen to paper. It was a Friday, and we were in the studio rehearsing a particularly hectic episode of sm:tv. Our schedule that day was so busy that we only had a fifteen-minute break for lunch. We got a call from Paul asking us when we could pop out of rehearsals and sign and we agreed to do it in our lunchbreak. He arrived with Darren, our other manager, and Ali. We needed somewhere private we could sign the most important piece of paper in our career, so we went into the back seat of Paul’s car and drove round the corner next to a newsagents. It was so glamorous.
After we’d signed the contract, Darren produced a bottle of champagne and we had a plastic cup full of bubbly to celebrate – we were over the moon, convinced we’d made the right decision and, at the time, even though the five of us were cramped into a car next to a newsagents, we knew it was a defining moment in our career.
By now, Saturday mornings were going from strength to strength, we’d established the new items in the show, we were the undisputed number-one show in the slot, and we started winning awards, including one from Loaded, who crowned us Best Double Act, and a very prestigious BAFTA for Best Entertainment Programme.
In the run-up to Christmas 2000, we recorded a special extended Christmas episode of Chums. It got a very respectable three and a half million viewers which was more than some episodes of Friends, meaning somehow we’d beaten the thing we’d started off parodying. Pre-recording the show also meant we could be on Christmas telly without leaving our front rooms, and that our families were forced to watch us, for once.
Now that we had an exclusive deal with ITV, they gave us our first big event to host – The BRIT Awards. Hosting the BRITs is a strange job – the hosts are only ever really remembered if they make a pig’s ear of it. Everyone is there to see the bands and, if the hosts do a competent job, they can end up being slightly pushed to one side, so either way you lose.
The BRITs has three different audiences – a mosh pit of schoolkids and a load of record-company executives sat at tables in the actual venue, and the viewers at home. We decided to just talk to the viewers at home – mainly because neither of the other two audiences seemed particularly interested in anything we had to say. For some reason, they were more concerned with the multi-million-selling superstars of the music world. We hadn’t been back to the BRITs since we were so cruelly robbed of our 1995 Best Newcomer
Award by those one-hit wonders Oasis, and this was another tough night. Although, when it came to the travel arrangements, we insisted on getting there by car, rather than in an ice-cream van.
On the plus side, we got to meet Coldplay, which was an honour and a real buzz… for Coldplay. I’m joking – we were big fans, and when they told us they watched sm:tv, we were amazed. We couldn’t believe rock bands were awake on a Saturday morning. Surely they should have been asleep, or busy throwing tellies out of windows – especially if we were on. One of the other big stars we met that night was Eminem and, when he came on stage to receive an award, he gave me a kind of hip-hop man hug. What he was really trying to say to me with that hug was ‘Respect to the original white rapper.’ He didn’t actually say it out loud, but I knew that was what he meant. On the whole, though, the BRITs wasn’t our favourite job – we’d have enjoyed it much more if we’d watched it down the pub.
But our next gig was one of the most surreal, ridiculous and downright brilliant things that’s ever happened to us.
In the summer, me, Ant and Cat were due to host a concert called Party in the Park, which was celebrating twenty-five years of the Prince’s Trust, a charity started by Prince Charles to help disadvantaged young people all over the UK. A few months before the concert, something very strange happened. Ten years earlier, the Trust had celebrated its fifteenth birthday – I know, my arithmetic’s pretty sharp, isn’t it? – and Prince Charles had done a TV interview to publicize the event, but it had got too personal and ended up detracting from the work the Trust was doing. He wanted to avoid a repeat of that, and he thought the way to do that was not to be interviewed by a political journalist but to talk to a couple of Geordies who spent their Saturday mornings dressing up and making children cry.
Prince Charles asked us to interview him, that’s what he’s trying to say.
I’m just going to write that again, to make sure you realize how insane it is. Prince Charles asked us, Ant and Dec, two lads from the west end of Newcastle, to interview him. On telly.
It must be the first – and last – time in TV history that the candidates for a job were Sir Trevor McDonald, the Dimblebys and Ant and Dec.
After we’d got over the shock of being asked, we leapt at the chance. The whole thing took months to organize – it takes that long to clear the diary of one of the most busy and important men in the world, or Ant, as he’s known to you and me. The day of the interview finally arrived and myself, Ant and a TV crew – including Conor, our faithful executive producer, made our way down to Prince Charles’s residence, Highgrove, in a state of great excitement.
As we approached the estate, I turned to Ant and said, ‘This isn’t just one for the book, this is a belter for the book.’ Before we started, we met Prince Charles off camera, which gave us an opportunity to get the protocol out of the way. For a start, you have to call him ‘Your Royal Highness’ the first time you address him, and then ‘Sir’ every time after that, and going through all that kind of stuff was really important. We’d planned on just calling him Chas, but in hindsight, that probably wouldn’t have gone down well. He was warm and genuine, which really put us at ease because, understandably, we were both incredibly nervous. Once we’d relaxed a bit, we started interviewing him properly, and we treated him, well, I’d like to think we treated him like royalty.
He told us about how the Trust came about and what it had achieved, and he also told us about Duchy Originals, his organic-food company, which has a giftshop on the grounds of Highgrove. We shot the interview in the gardens next to an incredible treehouse. When we first sat down by the tree-house, he told us he’d built it years earlier for William and Harry and that ‘they never bloody played in it.’
It was bigger than the house I grew up in.
We asked our carefully prepared questions, his answers were witty and charming, and he even asked us to be ambassadors for the trust, which was a massive honour. Throughout the whole thing, he was very easy to talk to, and he didn’t mention carting us off to the Tower or chopping off our heads at any point, so we thought it must have gone okay. After we’d finished the interview itself, the three of us did some shots together. Maybe I should rephrase that – it made it sound like we were downing tequilas with the Prince of Wales. We had to record some extra footage of the three of us talking to each other – there was no alcohol involved. These shots were done of us walking around the grounds – he’s really proud of his gardens, and he was telling us about bushes that had been planted by the Dalai Lama and amazing things like that. I had a pot plant my mam had given me in my bedroom, but this was a whole new ballgame.
Once the director had everything he needed, he called a wrap, Prince Charles shook our hands, did the same with the crew, including Conor, and walked off back to, well, back to whatever princes do with their days. We both immediately breathed a huge sigh of relief: we’d done it and we hadn’t ballsed it up. The whole experience had been fascinating but, at the same time, there’s a part of you that’s glad when something like that’s over, because you’re relieved not to have made a mess of it. Then, suddenly, we heard this huge bellowing Irish voice, shouting out:
‘Your Royal Highness!
Your Royal Highness!
Your Royal Highness!’
We spun round, and it was Conor, calling out at the top of his gruff Irish voice. I was thinking, ‘What’s he doing? He’s going to make us sit down and do another take of something. Don’t do that, let’s quit while we’re ahead – it went really well.’ Prince Charles heard him and turned round. With all the crew looking on, and Prince Charles giving him his undivided attention, Conor looked straight at him and said,
‘Your Royal Highness, one more question: what time does the giftshop open? My wife loves your jam.’
I could’ve died. We’re at Highgrove with the future king of England, we’ve done the biggest interview of our career, pulled it off without any cock-ups, and Conor starts worrying about what his wife’s going to put on her toast. Prince Charles was clearly a bit taken aback by the question, but he very politely said, ‘I’m not sure. I’ll get someone to find out and get a message to you.’ But Conor carried on: ‘Yeah, she loves the jam – and your fudge as well, and…’
I was just thinking, ‘Shut up. Just leave it.’
We were both mortified, but Prince Charles didn’t seem to mind too much, and Conor’s wife got her jam in the end, so everyone was happy. One of the many lovely things about that day were the pictures that came out of it. We asked Ken McKay, the photographer who’s done the publicity shots for almost all our TV shows, to send us prints, and I gave them to my mam and my nanna, who put them straight up on the wall. I even chucked in a couple of jars of jam, but that didn’t seem to make the same impact on them as they had on Conor’s missus.
And the nice thing is that, ever since that interview, we’ve become best mates with Prince Charles – the three of us speak on the phone most days, we’re often round at one of his palaces for dinners and DVDs, and the three of us go on holiday together every year.
You’ve always got to go too far with some stories, haven’t you?
Sorry.
Chapter 23
When you’re mates with Prince Charles, the world is your oyster and…
I won’t tell you again – drop it.
Okay, in the summer of 2001, it was time for us and ITV to take a trip to the zoo. And by that I mean we finally got to make the big prime-time, Saturday-night zoo we’d been badgering ITV to do. It was called Slap Bang, and it was the show we’d been waiting all our presenting lives to make. Unfortunately, it ended up being the show we’ve spent the rest of our presenting lives trying to forget.
There were so many things wrong with the show that we could spend a whole book talking about it, but don’t worry, we won’t. The main one was that the prime-time audience didn’t really know who we were. Before you can be a success in the harsh battleground of Saturday-night telly, TV experts have proved that i
t’s important for the audience to actually know your names. We might have been popular with kids, hungover students and some mums and dads on Saturday mornings, but that didn’t mean we could just roll up on a Saturday night and take the world by storm. Admittedly, Friends Like These had gone down well on Saturday nights, but that was a format, and people tuned in to see the games more than they did to see us. It certainly wasn’t an all-singing, all-dancing Ant and Dec show which, come to think of it, was probably one of the main reasons it was relatively successful.
The second problem was that the show didn’t have what we call ‘a spine’, a point, a reason to be on telly. As presenters, when you come on at the top of a show, it’s important to be able to say, ‘Hello and welcome to the show that finds the best talent in Britain’ or ‘Hello and welcome to the show that finds the famous person who’s best at eating a kangaroo’s unmentionables,’ that kind of thing, and Slap Bang just didn’t have that.
Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Page 21