Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (28 page)

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 it’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.

It was called
Slap Bang
because it was on a Saturday night, which was supposed to be slap bang in the middle of the weekend, but we quickly discovered that wasn’t enough to hang an hour of prime-time entertainment on. The final problem, or at least the final one I’m going to go on about, was that Saturday night is a very unforgiving piece of the TV schedule. On Saturday mornings, you can mess around, dress up, do double entendres and, if things don’t work, a lot of people don’t notice. But if people are taking the time to sit down and devote an hour of their time to your show on a Saturday night, it’s got to be polished and slick – two things our new show definitely wasn’t.

It also got us into trouble with the TV watchdogs again. We had an item on the show called
Donnelly
, which was a spoof of
Parkinson
, and every week I would interview a celebrity while Ant kept interrupting. You’re starting to work out why the show wasn’t a hit, aren’t you? One week on
Donnelly,
our guest was Bill Roache, who plays Ken Barlow in
Coronation Street
and, in the sketch, I shot him with a plastic gun. There were hundreds of complaints, divided equally between, ‘You shouldn’t shoot people on Saturday-night telly’ and ‘That Ken Barlow sketch was dreadful.’

We knew the whole show was in trouble when, after a couple of weeks, ITV started moving it earlier and earlier in the schedule. We started off at 7.30 on a Saturday night and, by the sixth and final episode, we were on at 5.30 in the afternoon. If they’d shifted us back much further, we’d have been back on Saturday mornings.

Not long after the series finished, our management team, Pete Powell, Paul Worsley and Darren Worsley, knocked on my door one Wednesday night just as me and Dec were about to head off for our weekly game of football. They told us that ITV had cancelled the show and that
Slap Bang
wouldn’t be coming back. It was the first real blip in our career at ITV. We were both,
to use a technical TV term, properly gutted. Any other day we would have taken a deep breath, evaluated the decision and then gone and got very, very drunk. But, for once, we didn’t, we decided to go and do something else that left us red-faced and sweating – play football. It was the most aggressive, competitive game of our lives – we were like men possessed. Actually, Dec has been known to lose his temper on a football pitch before but, to be honest, that’s probably more due to small-man syndrome than anything else.

Watch it, or you’ll get a smack in the mouth.

I rest my case.

It felt really good to go out and take some exercise and, when I say exercise, I actually mean running around trying to kick people. Although after that game, we were still, to quote Ant, ‘properly gutted’. No one likes to fail, and it felt like we had – spectacularly. Critics and audiences hadn’t liked it, and that hurts when you’ve worked so hard on something. On the way home, we stopped at a well-known Colonel-and-chicken eatery and, as we were coming out of the place, two drunk blokes walked past and said, ‘Oi, you two, that show you do on a Saturday night is absolutely shit.’

It might not have been the most detailed audience research we’ve ever done, but it was impeccable timing and even more proof that we’d done the wrong show at the wrong time. On the plus side, they hadn’t thrown any chairs at us, but the whole thing left a bad taste in our mouths. The incident with the blokes, that is, not the chicken, which was delicious.
Slap Bang
was the first new thing we’d done as part of our exclusive ITV deal, and it had bombed.

We did the only thing we could – we went back to Saturday mornings, played general-knowledge quizzes with kids, dressed up as cartoon characters and did sketches about farting.

After all, we still had our dignity.

Chapter 24