Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (27 page)

The thing is, we’re not egomaniacs who spend half our life sitting around thinking about how much the audience love us.

Aren’t we? I mean, yeah, you’re right, we’re not.

So when we did something like the April Fool, we didn’t really think it would upset kids who were watching at home. We certainly didn’t anticipate the backlash, and the whole thing got quite a lot of press coverage.

I was flying to Newcastle the next day to see my family, and when I got to the airport I saw the local paper. On the
Sunday Sun
’s front page, there was a picture from the show and a headline that said: ‘We thought Dec was dead.’

Your mother must have been so proud.

Even if Dec thought he was a great actor – which he wasn’t – there were people we worked with on Saturday mornings who showed us up from time to time. One of the finest, most professional and downright beautiful people we ever had on
sm:tv
was Ms Kylie Minogue. As well as coming on to perform on
cd:uk,
and of course appearing in
Chums,
she also stood in
as a guest host. Cat had a few weeks off and Kylie was kind enough to step in. She must have been well paid. I remember the first time it happened very clearly. We’d always rehearse the whole show in Brixton on a Wednesday morning and, although we’d be in the office earlier in the week, that would be the first time we’d see the whole script. Unbeknown to us, in her role as our stand-in co-host, Kylie had asked if she could see a copy of the script the night before. I should tell you at this point that the script for
sm:tv
and
cd:uk
was an absolute monster – the show lasted for three hours, so the script was about seventy pages long. Anyway, we turn up for rehearsal on Wednesday morning with a bacon sandwich in our hands and a tabloid paper under our arms, ready to try and get our heads round that week’s script.

We said hello to Kylie – which isn’t a bad way for anyone to start their working day – and after a quick chat, started rehearsing. It quickly became apparent that Kylie had learnt the
whole script
off by heart. Every single word. She was word perfect before we’d even seen our scripts. You might think that, after being shown up like that, when it came to the following Wednesday, we’d have followed her lead and learnt the whole script before rehearsals.

She should be so lucky.

We had much better things to do with our time than to spend it learning scripts. We had important stuff to deal with – like arguing over a board game. Yes, that’s right, a board game. This was the time when we had the second and, so far, only other fight of our twenty years together. It was over the
Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
board game.

It was ridiculous.

I’m glad you admit that now.

No, what you did was ridiculous.

We’ll let the readers be the judge of that, shall we? We were round at my house playing the game, and it was Dec’s turn. The question was:

‘The novels of which author are the most-borrowed books from British public libraries?

A: Catherine Cookson

B: Agatha Christie

C: Barbara Cartland

D: Ruth Rendell’

I knew it definitely wasn’t Catherine Cookson or Barbara Cart-land, so it had to be either Ruth Rendell or Agatha Christie.

I asked him if he had an answer yet.

‘I think it’s between Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie… but I’m not certain,’ I said. ‘I think I’m going to have to take a 50–50.’

So, naturally I took away Catherine Cookson and Barbara Cartland, leaving him with Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie.

It was a sneaky thing to do – and we quickly got into a heated debate:

‘You arsehole.’

‘What? It’s a 50–50 – that’s what they do on the telly.’

‘You just sat there and heard me say Ruth Rendell or Agatha Christie.’

‘Exactly – that’s what they do on the telly.’

‘You arsehole. That’s not fair.’

‘It
is
fair – I’m in control of the board and I decide what the 50–50 is. Christ, Tarrant doesn’t have to put up with this shit…’

‘And
I
don’t have to put up with your shit. It’s my board, and I’m going home.’

And with that, I packed up the board and went home. I was furious. I thought – and I still do think for that matter – that Ant was an arsehole and he wasn’t playing fair.

The worst thing about it was that I was his phone a friend, but he couldn’t call me ’cos he’d just stormed out of my house with a board game under his arm. We made up the next day but Dec has never managed to forgive and forget.

No I have not. I think we’d better change the subject before this turns ugly.

You’re right. Let’s move on to two very special and memorable moments for
sm:tv
and
cd:uk.
The first was that we actually made it to our one hundredth show.

After the programme’s rocky beginnings and low ratings, to have made it to one hundred shows was probably the proudest moment of our career so far. The show was a blockbuster. There was a star-studded episode of
Chums
that was all about the fact that Ant couldn’t blink. Don’t worry; it was funnier than it sounds. In the episode, I organized a charity single for ‘Ant Aid’, where we all sang a song called ‘Blink For Ant’. There was Victoria Beckham, Martine McCutcheon, Mel C, 5ive, Atomic Kitten and Billie Piper, all trying to help Ant blink. It was one of the biggest things we ever did. Plus, I managed not to faint, which was a bonus.

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.