Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story

by Ant McPartlin

  ANT LISA

  A bookend. A National Television Award for Best Presenter.

  I couldn’t believe it. In the space of two hours, I’d played an exhausting game of football, gashed my foot, spent goodness knows how long in the waiting room and now I was coming across like a vain egomaniac. The clearly overworked doctor looked at me with an understandable air of disgust – his eyes were saying, ‘Is that all you do with your life, dress up in football kits and play with your awards? You make me sick.’ I had three stitches, and they sent me home, but I could’ve sworn I heard the doctor call me ‘Awards Boy’ under his breath as I was leaving. I hobbled out into the waiting room and, after being stopped for several camera-phone photos (three of which were with slappy-face guy), I was off home to finally have that soak. The next day I managed to go on the shoot, much to the relief of our new producer, Anna Blue. On the plus side, I’ve been excused from dusting ever since.

  It’s the most showbiz injury in history.

  Another series of Takeaway meant another pilgrimage of visitors to come and stay with us in London and, as with every series, our families made up some of those visitors. My mam and dad came down from Newcastle to see the show and have a weekend in the capital. Whenever they visit, it only takes about five minutes before I feel like I’m in their house. During the series on a show day I would probably get out of bed around eight thirty, but by eight, without fail, my mam’s knocking on the door telling me it’s time to get up. I lie there thinking, ‘I know, I manage to do this every week!’ My dad has a potter round the garden, as most dads do. He’ll be up at eight and down the paper shop before he pops in to see Ken the butcher to get some ‘nice’ sausages – he knows more about my local shops than I do. My mam won’t go back to Newcastle until the laundry basket is empty and the house is tidy. I don’t ask them to do any of this stuff, I think they actually like it. Over the years, I’ve stopped fighting it and, besides, there’s a lot to be said for leaving the house having already read the paper and enjoyed a sausage sandwich.

  As well as my mam and dad, I’ll have other members of the family to stay too. My sisters, Moyra and Camalia, always venture down at some point with their families, as do some of my brothers – incidentally, at the last count, I noticed eleven nieces and nephews have been conjured up from somewhere. There’s Ainé, Colm, Sarah, Thomas, James, Matthew, Eleanor, Dominick, Oliver, Clodagh and Daniel. Although that number may well have increased by the time you read this book.

  One of the lovely things about having so many nieces and nephews in the family is how confused they get about me being on the telly. Until they’re three or four years old, it’s very simple – they just think everyone’s uncle is on TV. The next stage is bewilderment – they don’t quite understand how it’s possible for me to be on TV and in the room with them at the same time. They point at the telly and shout ‘Dec’, then point at me and shout ‘Dec’. That lasts for a little while and then, finally, it all makes sense and they ask me to come and pick them up from school, to prove to their mates that they aren’t making it up.

  Newspapers can freak them out a bit too. A few weeks ago, Camalia’s three-year-old son Daniel ran in holding the paper, which had a picture of me and Ant on the front page.

  ‘That’s you!’ he informed me. ‘You’re in the paper!’

  ‘Is it?’ I said. Don’t get me wrong – I could clearly see it was me, but I played along anyway.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked. ‘What am I doing in the paper?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said incredulously, ‘I cannot read!’

  After a quick trip to Australia for a night shift or nineteen and a series that was won by Christopher Biggins, we came back to England for Christmas. Just before Santa came down the chimney, I remember bumping into Biggins, who told me that, since being in the jungle, he’d never signed so many autographs in his life.

  That is one of the strange things about fame – people asking you for autographs. I can understand it with kids, but otherwise I’ve always thought the idea of getting someone to write their name on a piece of paper is weird. If it’s a football team who’ve all signed a shirt or something then I can understand it, but getting me to sign a Burger King napkin somehow doesn’t seem quite so exciting.

  The other thing people do is walk up to me and say, ‘Are you Ant?’ You tell them you are and then they’ll go, ‘You’re not,’ and you’re thinking, ‘Do I have to prove it somehow?’

  My favourite is ‘Are you who I think you are?’ – I always think of answering, ‘I don’t know – who do you think I am?’

  Along with the enquiries about our identity and requests to sign napkins, the other big part of our life in the public eye is the camera phone. If you’re on telly, it comes with the territory that people might want to take pictures of you, but here’s a little piece of advice for anyone who wants to take a photo of someone famous with their phone. Don’t pretend you’re sending a text – we can hear the phone click and we can see it pointed up in the air – no one holds their phone like that to send a text.

  And at least switch it to camera function before you raise it – because we can tell when you’re holding that phone up and you can’t find the camera function. Don’t get me wrong, we understand that it’s par for the course but, take my word for it, it’s easier to just come up and ask.

  And while we’re on the subject, if you do come and ask, make sure you know how your phone works. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been stood somewhere thinking, ‘Hurry up, mate, I’ve had my arm round your sister for ten minutes and it’s just getting embarrassing now.’ Before you know what’s happening, they’ve taken three pictures of their own face by mistake and when they finally work out how to use it, the memory’s full. I’ve been stood in pubs or shops or restaurants on numerous occasions with my arm around someone I don’t know while some bloke decides which photos of his family he can delete and replace with ‘one of Ant and Dec’. I can hear them now: ‘No, not that one – that’s Christmas with the kids.’

  On the subject of the great British public, we hit the road again in early 2008 for the auditions of the second series of Britain’s Got Talent. During the auditions, it was very clear that most of the acts had watched series one very, very carefully – we had a load of opera singers. And none of them was as good as Paul Potts.

  One of the stand-out auditions from that series came from a double act that consisted of a clever and dedicated professional and a simple creature who did as he was told.

  Sounds familiar…

  Kate and Gin the Dog turned out to be the first decent dog act we’d had on the show, and Simon Cowell in particular was ecstatic about that. You might not think it, but he loves dogs…

  It’s just humans he’s got a problem with…

  Other highlights on this series were a double act called Signature, which consisted of a Michael Jackson impersonator and an Indian sidekick posing as a cleaner with a broom. And of course the fourteen-year-old breakdancer George Sampson.

  George went on to win the second series. He had originally auditioned for series one, but didn’t make the cut, so winning the show at the second time of asking made him a bona fide comeback kid.

  I like to think that, in many ways, he was influenced by the finest child breakdancer in history – Declan Donnelly at the Tyneside Irish Club in the mid-eighties. I like to think that, even though it’s not true.

  It’s easy to sound wise after the event, but we both genuinely thought George should have made the semi-finals the year before. It’s true! But in series two he came back better than ever and it was a real rags-to-riches story We were both really pleased when he won it – he provided a really positive image for young kids in Britain: so many get labelled hoodies and thugs and George was and is a great role model.

  Just like me in the eighties.

  Yeah, just like you in the eighties – except he’s successful, talented and he doesn’t collect coins in ashtrays.

&n
bsp; After we’d finished our whistlestop tour of theatres for the auditions, we went straight to a new series of Saturday Night Takeaway. The Ant versus Dec feature, where we’re challenged not to break our arms, let dogs poo in our houses and not die abseiling down twenty-four-storey buildings, became a battle of the teams, which led to the clever title, Ant versus Dec – The Teams. As you’d expect, there were some challenges that involved danger for the teams, like bobsleighing in Austria, and some challenges that involved danger for the audience’s eardrums – like singing in barber-shop quartets. The first challenge we faced was a military field-gun challenge, and it almost ended with me coming to blows with Paul Daniels. He was on my team, by the way, I don’t just pick fights with TV magicians for the sake of it.

  It was a classic case of little-man syndrome – it’s bad enough when you have one bloke with it, but put two of them together and you’re bound to get fireworks.

  The first show of any series on Takeaway is hectic – me and Ant have been working so hard on every last detail of the show all week, and when it comes to Saturday, there are so many different elements to remember that the last thing we need is to get sidetracked by a row with Debbie McGee’s other half, but that’s what happened. We were rehearsing the challenge, which is essentially an army assault course that involves dragging a huge cannon under, over and through obstacles, when the trouble started.

  As competitive as ever, I looked over at Dec’s team during rehearsal and it seemed like they were, well, breaking the rules! As part of the challenge, the whole team had to get over one obstacle before any of them could start on the next one – if they failed to do that on the night, it was instant disqualification, and much as I desperately want to win Ant versus Dec – not least because I’ve never won a single series – I didn’t want to win by a disqualification, so I told Dec about his team’s mistake.

  I thanked Ant and reminded my team of the rules. They were all fine with it, except for one person – Paul Daniels. Paul started to debate it, saying the rules had changed, why had no one told him? I tried to calmly say to him that the rules hadn’t changed, they had always been that way – the next thing I know me and Paul are standing toe to toe, jabbing our fingers in each other’s faces, having a full-on argument. Ex-Manchester United winger Lee Sharpe was looking on open-mouthed as me and Paul bawled at each other, and then, just as things were about to get really heated, former X-Factor contestant Chico came in and broke it up.

  I just remember looking over, thinking, ‘Yep, that’s Takeaway …’

  We both calmed down, and I apologized to Paul. I was feeling the pressure of the first show and took it out on him. Even as I was shouting I was thinking to myself, ‘Shut up, you tit, you really shouldn’t be shouting at Paul Daniels!’ Incidentally, my team won the challenge, and as a certain someone might say, ‘Now that’s magic.’

  I can’t believe you’re still gloating over that – now that’s tragic.

  Chapter 42

  As you’ve read over the last few chapters, life in 2007 and 2008 included arguing with magicians and making American TV shows, but those years also included some of the toughest and most horrible times of our entire career. In 2007, ITV began investigating irregularities with phone-in competitions and voting on a number of TV shows. At first, even though Saturday Night Takeaway and another programme we’d hosted, Gameshow Marathon were two of the shows being investigated, we weren’t worried – we didn’t for a moment expect there to be any wrongdoing on any of our shows. We were shocked when, in October 2007, a report was published by the company undertaking the investigation, Deloitte, which said it had found there were irregularities with both shows. People had spent money entering competitions they had no chance of winning, which is, of course, indefensible. We were given the news by Paul and Darren in a meeting at James Grant Management. We both instantly felt physically sick.

  A couple of days earlier, I’d had a journalist call at my house and ask me if I wanted to comment on allegations of TV fakery, so even then I had started to worry. Because two of our shows were investigated, and we were two of the highest profile performers supposedly involved in the scandal, we were savaged by the press. We were credited as being executive producers of Takeaway, so people said we must have known these irregularities were occurring, but our role as executive producers was purely a creative one. Our overall concern was the content of the show, and we oversaw that side of things. We had no idea how the phone lines worked, or about health and safety procedures or risk assessments or how any of the legalities worked – we dealt with the ideas, the words and scripts and what the viewers saw on screen. And I can guarantee that’s pretty much how it works with any performer with an EP credit.

  When the first report was published, our first concern was for the audience. Innocent people had spent hard-earned money entering competitions they would never win. That wasn’t right. We then became worried that the viewers who had been affected would think we had known all about it, and sanctioned these actions. That would have led to our audience not being able to trust us and, once that happens, it’s all over. It was an awful thought. Huge mistakes had been made – the fact that people lost money was inexcusable, and we’d come so far and done so much, the thought of something like this ending our career was heartbreaking.

  We’ve always thought of our career as being a three-way relationship – between me, Dec and the audience. Ever since we’ve been on telly, we’ve prided ourselves on trying to understand our audience, and for something like this to happen was upsetting and maddening. We released statements apologizing, but that didn’t stop there being a feeding frenzy by the media – people were saying we should’ve been arrested and even gone to prison, they implied we’d lied in our statements when we attempted to reassure viewers that we had no knowledge of what had happened. ‘No smoke without fire’ was the phrase they most enjoyed trotting out but, worst of all, some people claimed we knew about the phone-line procedure but didn’t care and helped maximize the profit so we could take a cut of the phone revenue, which is just a downright lie.

  In the autumn of 2007, on the way to Australia for I’m a Celebrity…, we stopped off in LA for some meetings. While we were out there, the National Television Awards were taking place back in London. We’ve always regarded the NTAs very highly – they’re voted for by the public so you’re able to get a real sense of what the audience is enjoying. Because of the timing, it was impossible not to see the NTAs as a big test – if the public had lost faith in us it would be made very clear; they just wouldn’t vote for us. Even our publicist, Simon Jones, was being told by the newspapers behind the scenes that the result would be an indication of whether or not the public thought we were guilty. The Mirror even ran a piece the very day of the awards saying we feared ‘a backlash from viewers’.

  We told the NTAs that, unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to attend the awards because of our American commitments, but that if we did win anything we would be available to do a live satellite link. They said they wouldn’t know anything for certain until four o’clock in the afternoon British time on the day, which was 8 a.m. in LA. Paul, our manager, promised he’d ring us from London as soon as he had any news. I set my alarm for seven thirty just to be sure I didn’t miss the call, but I needn’t have bothered, I was awake long before that – in fact I barely slept. Eight o’clock came and went, and the phone didn’t ring. I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, minutes felt like hours and I was feeling increasingly anxious. Then, just before quarter past, the phone rang; it was Paul. I couldn’t really deal with small talk, so I just asked him outright, ‘Have you heard anything?’ My heart was beating and my stomach was in knots.

  ‘You’d better get dressed,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a satellite link to do.’

  The joy and the relief were indescribable. The minute I put the phone down, I lay on my bed and sobbed my heart out. I’ve never been so thankful.

  I was in the hotel restaurant having breakfast and Paul ra
ng me straight away. I felt the same as Dec – relief, joy, gratitude, just so many emotions at once. It was nothing to do with winning an award, it was about what it signified, the audience knew we hadn’t betrayed them, we hadn’t been part of the phone-line ‘fixing’ and they still had faith in us. They still wanted to be part of that relationship which meant – and means – everything to both of us. We went to Australia, determined to put in the performance of our lives – after everything that had happened, it was the least we could do as a thank-you to our audience.

  In May 2008, ITV’s fine was announced and the whole story was dragged up again. The press and media were full of the same stories. It was the lead story on all TV news bulletins, they used images from Takeaway and we went through the whole thing all over again.