Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (19 page)

In one edition of Retro Cops, David had written in the part of a vicar, and we agreed to let him do it. In the sketch, we had to stop the vicar, who was driving down the street, and take his car. It was like
Heartbeat
meets
Life On Mars
. A bit. On the day, David turned up with his own glasses and comedy teeth. We had to steal his car, while he was trying to do the same with the limelight.

We went to our starting positions, and the director called out ‘Action!’ David, dressed as the vicar, drove the car into shot as planned. We stopped him, and pulled him out of the car. What we didn’t know was that while we’d been getting
ready to film, David had got into the car and taken his trousers off. So when we pulled him out of the car, the top half of him was a vicar, and the bottom half was just pants and socks. We started laughing our heads off, and the poor director was shouting
‘Cut! David, put your trousers back on’ – not the last time someone in the TV industry would say that to Mr Walliams. When he said he wanted to impress everyone with his part, we hadn’t realized that was what he had in mind. But there’s a time and a place for vicars in their underpants, and it’s not on Children’s BBC at 5.10 on a Thursday afternoon. Just like Dean, David had to constantly be reined in, and that was exactly what we wanted. We were finally getting the kind of risqué show we’d hoped to make first time around and, if the price we paid for that was seeing David Walliams in false teeth and underpants, well, we were prepared to pay it.

If I remember rightly, David came to the wrap party of that series and sprung two surprises on us. Number one, he was wearing a pink tutu, which gave us an early glimpse of what a convincing laydee he made; and number two, he brought his girlfriend, which was a shock, because we’d always assumed he was gay. He was great fun to have around and, whenever we see him today, we have a laugh reminiscing about the old times, as we remind him how he owes his whole career to us, while he maintains he was the only decent thing on
The Ant and Dec Show
.

We started having guests on the second series too. When it came to booking them, the only real criterion was that we wanted them to be people we were keen to meet. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton, the Sultan of Brunei and Peter Beardsley were busy – so we went with the kind of old-school showbiz legends we’d always enjoyed watching as kids. That meant we were lucky enough to perform with the likes of Frank Carson and Lionel Blair. Guests like that were always professional, dedicated and, above all, available. In the case of Lionel Blair, we finished the show with a song called ‘Get inside a Bin’, which we performed, as you might have guessed, from inside bins. Even Lionel got inside one, from which he delivered the line, ‘Hi, I’m Lionel Blair, and I hope you are too.’

That’s still one of my favourite lines of that series. We’d done some research, and by ‘we’, I mean some people from the BBC we’d never met, and discovered that the audience for the first series was made up predominantly of girls, so we were told to try and make the new series a bit more male-friendly. That was music to our ears.

When it came to pushing things, our first target was our old nemesis,
Blue Peter.
Yes, this was some of the sharpest satire on TV. Katy Hill was one of the presenters and, at the time, was considered the pin-up of Children’s TV. We did a song on the show one week called ‘I Love Katy Hill, she’s a
Blue Peter
presenter’, and in the song, I had a line that said she was ‘gagging for it’.

We knew it was completely inappropriate for Children’s TV, and that was exactly why we did it. ‘Gagging for it’ wasn’t even a double entendre – it was a very single entendre, and we got into proper trouble for saying it pre-watershed.

I think the Tom Jones-esque pelvic thrust you delivered with the line might have made things worse.

Hmmm, do you think so? Let’s be honest, it was about 95 per cent of the reason we got into trouble. But this paled into insignificance after we introduced a feature called Beat the Barber. Before we’d started making the new series, we knew we had to do something to get it talked about, and this was it. It’s been said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and, with this item, we tested that theory to the limit. The premise was very simple: we asked kids from the audience hair-related questions, while the ‘barber’, who, miraculously wasn’t played by David Walliams, hovered over them. If they got the questions wrong, he shaved their heads. We’d had to fight hard to persuade the BBC to let us do it, but eventually they said yes. The kids and their parents all gave permission before they played the game, and the first three contestants were boys. Then, we had a girl who entered. That was when we knew things would really kick off.

I don’t know why the fact that the girl, whose name was Laurie Slater, had ginger hair made it better, it just did. On the day, she failed to Beat the Barber, which meant it was out with the clippers and off with her long, flowing red locks. When the show was transmitted, there was an uproar. We received a record number of complaints for a kids show, and Conor had to go on the Channel 4 TV show,
Right To Reply
and the BBC’s own
Points Of View
to defend Beat the Barber, and the Katy Hill incident. For Conor, as the producer, it was tough to go on these shows and defend our ideas but, for us, sat at home with a beer watching them, it was strangely exciting.

The thing was, the item could be justified: these kids and their parents knew what they were getting into when they played the game. To us, it was all part of not talking down to kids, which has always been really important to us. Laurie even went on
Right To Reply
with Conor, although I can’t remember how much of her hair had grown back by then. It has to be said, when the BBC, the papers and the whole TV industry went mad about it, it probably wasn’t our wisest move to issue a statement simply saying, ‘Keep your hair on.’

By the end of that series, we felt like we’d found our feet as TV presenters and knew it was something we really enjoyed doing. In fact, we enjoyed it so much, we seemed to be taking our work home with us, because we were always playing pranks in the flat, and the girls were often the victims.

Lisa was staying one night and needed to get to bed early so, like the considerate and respectful souls we are, Dec and me made ourselves scarce and went down the pub. Several hours later, we got back and decided that it would be the funniest thing in the world if Dec impersonated me and got into bed with Lisa. He asked me what I’d normally say when I got into bed. I told him that I would usually call out softly, ‘Hello, babes,’ and that I would then slide an arm around Lisa. I nipped to the toilet while Dec prepared for his role. I could hear him practising his ‘Hello, babes,’ in what he felt sounded like my voice.

An actor of my calibre takes every role very seriously.

When Dec was happy with his impression of me, he went into my room, got into bed, put his arm round Lisa and delivered his line.

I was very good, if I do say so myself.

Then I burst in, turned the light on and shouted, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on here?’ Lisa jumped out of her skin, while us two laughed our heads off.

I don’t think she spoke to me for about three days.

Once we’d finished our TV series, and scaring the life out of poor Lisa, it was time to get back on the pop-star treadmill, which meant yet again endless hours of interviews, photoshoots and personal appearances. It was a daunting thought but, on the bright side, we’d decided to indulge in a showbiz crime we’d been waiting three years to commit.

We were about to kill off PJ and Duncan.

Chapter 16

Killing off PJ and Duncan wasn’t the only big move we made that summer. Together we took an important decision – we parted company with our music manager, Kim Glover. We’d felt for a while that things weren’t really working out with Kim and we were keen to try and take our music in a new direction – preferably one that didn’t involve miming, corny dance routines and roadshows. Our solicitor, Paul Russell, who still takes care of our legal business, handled the whole thing. Paul’s got so many things going for him – a law degree, plenty of experience and two first names. He’s also got our best interests at heart; at least that’s what it says on the contract I’m currently reading aloud from.

We sat down with Paul for a few hours – standing up for that long seemed unnecessary – and said that we wanted to split with Kim. He then explained our position in clear legal terms that any simpleton could understand. Then, when he saw the baffled looks on our faces, he tried again. What we needed to do was sack Kim
and
Dave Holly, to make a clean break, and then re-employ Dave, who we wanted to keep. This was all for ‘legal reasons’. The lawyers among our readers…

Who are you trying to kid?

…
will know why we had to do it; the rest of you can just do what we did – and take Paul’s word for it.

On his advice, we rang Dave and said, ‘No hard feelings, but we’re sacking you – and then giving you your job back next week.’ Dave understood, plus it gave him a week off from us two, which was probably why he was whooping and cheering down the phone. Then, Paul sent a legal letter to Kim confirming what we’d discussed. If you’re wondering what the difference between a normal letter and a legal letter is, the answer’s simple – about three hundred quid.

Like the mature adults we were, once we knew the letter had been sent, we did the decent and honourable thing – and ran off to Marbella for the weekend. It wasn’t that we’d done anything to be ashamed of, but we were twenty-one, so rather than face the music, we decided to get out of the way and let the dust settle. Looking back, if we’d been older and wiser, we might have handled it differently. But at that age, we decided to jump on a plane and leave our problems behind.

When we got back, we got down to the serious business of killing off our evil alter egos. Ever since the first single, we’d been desperate to use our real-life names, and now, with two hugely successful albums – okay, two albums – behind us, Telstar agreed. We were thrilled, although in hindsight, it seems odd that we were so excited about using our real names. No one in our real lives called us PJ and Duncan – well, not unless they were really trying to wind us up.

It wasn’t just our names we were being honest about either. We came out as full-blown heterosexuals who had girlfriends. We were really living on the edge now: using our own names, mentioning those of our girlfriends – talk about pushing the boundaries.

To help us do all this, we had a new press officer called Simon Hargreaves, and he encouraged us to be a bit more ourselves. The mid- to late nineties was an era characterized by what the press christened ‘lad culture’. It was all about drinking, partying and reading
Loaded
magazine, and it suited us down to the ground. Simon got us featured in
The Face
,
Loaded
and, unbelievably, the
NME
. We were trying to rely less on
Smash Hits
,
Just
Seventeen
and
Mizz
, and Si pulled off the miraculous trick of making music journalists take us seriously. In his spare time, he also turns water into wine and walks on water. After years of giving sugar-coated interviews to girls’ magazines, we could finally let people see us for what we were – two young lads who liked drinking lager, partying hard and playing cutlery-based pranks on each other.

Telstar also took some big decisions – and they decided that our third album would have something neither of the first two had.

More than one top-ten hit?

Don’t be ridiculous. They decided to spend some serious money on a big marketing campaign with one central message: ‘Two men in their early twenties are going to use their real names.’ We also persuaded them to let us change our music and aim for a more mature sound.

We decided it was probably a good time to change our image. We went for dinner with Si and the then editor of
Smash Hits
, Kate Thornton, who went on to host ITV2’s coverage of
Pop Idol
and, later,
The X-Factor
. As editor of the most powerful pop magazine in the country, Kate gave us her thoughts on what sort of image her readers would respond to. It was a long and complex discussion that took in many schools of thought and stylistic influences and, in the end, we reached a major decision.

It was all about the hair.

A few days later we were going to shoot the video for our first single as Ant and Dec, ‘Better Watch Out’, and we were also scheduled to do a photo shoot with Rankin, a genuinely cool and respected photographer, so there was no time to spare.

I’d wanted to shave my head for a while, so this was the perfect excuse. There were only two problems: with a forehead like mine, a shaved head isn’t a good look, and Lisa hated it. She told me I looked like a Romanian orphan, and refused to kiss me until it grew back, although she did express an interest in adopting me. We’d known the Rankin shoot was coming for
a while, though, and we really liked his work, so we both stayed off the beer and lost some weight. We were determined to look good in the shots.

Ant had it easy with his shaved head. I didn’t have it so good. The plan was to dye my hair a lighter shade of blond but, when it was finished, I looked in the mirror and just had one question for Ant: