Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Read online

  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:

  ‘Is this ginger?’

  To which I replied, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And then left the room, so I could laugh loudly and properly.

  I got it lightened slightly on the day of the shoot, but there wasn’t much you could do. I was gutted. The image change we’d been so excited about ended up with me looking like a young Mick Hucknall.

  Even though our third album, The Cult of Ant and Dec, wasn’t released until May 1997, ‘Better Watch Out’ came out in August of 1996, and it made the top ten. Okay, it was number ten – but that’s still technically the top ten, and no one can take that away from us. I’ve got such happy memories of that summer – our music was changing and we had our sights set on the big time.

  When it came to the rest of the album, we worked with a couple of writers called Biff and Matt. Music-industry professionals called them Stannard and Rowe, so they insisted we stuck with Biff and Matt. They helped us try and develop the more mature sound we were after. I know what you’re thinking, ‘What, more mature than “Our Radio Rocks”? You’d have to write an opera.’ Biff and Matt even encouraged us to write a few tracks ourselves – and some of them weren’t even Boyz II Men covers. In the past, we’d written a B-side here or a lyric there, but this time we were much more involved, and it was great fun.

  We wanted to make music that was more like the stuff we were listening to, which was bands like Oasis and Blur. That’s just how ambitious, determined and downright stupid we were.

  Towards the end of the year, I got the chance to make some other big changes, to correct some of the mistakes I’d made in Ant’s and my first few years as pop stars. For a start, I got the big bedroom when w
e moved out of our flat in Fulham and into a new one in Chelsea. Finally, I could put the coin-toss catastrophe behind me. But before we’d fully moved out of the Fulham flat, or ‘vacated the property’, the lady from the estate agents came round to check that everything was spick and span. It was neither, but there wasn’t any lasting damage and we always had the fire-hazard sofa up our sleeves if things got, well, heated.

  She was going round the kitchen, checking everything still worked when she did something that shocked Ant and me to the core. There was one small door that we’d tried and failed to open when we first moved in, and she did it straight away, and said, ‘Yep, the dishwasher’s fine.’

  We couldn’t believe it. We’d been there twelve months and we hadn’t known we had a dishwasher. I was devastated. Just think of the time I could’ve saved teaching Dec how to wash up.

  When we moved into our new flat in Chelsea, we were still leading the Men Behaving Badly lifestyle. We spent a lot of time in various pubs, but one of our most popular haunts was Sainsbury’s. It was at the end of the road, so we used to go down there and stock up on essentials like bread, milk and, of course, beer. We’d fill up a trolley and wheel it back to the flat – it was quicker than driving there. Although, if Sainsbury’s lawyers are reading this, I’d like to point out that we did always return the trolleys.

  After a few months, though, disaster struck: Sainsbury’s introduced a system that meant that, when you took the trolley out of the car park, the wheels locked. Presumably it was designed to stop people stealing the trolleys, although as I say, we always returned them – I don’t think we were the cause of the new system being introduced. Anyway, as you’d expect, the new trolleys deterred most people from taking them off the premises. Most people. But not us. It just meant we would half push, half lift our trolley down the road, the wheels scraping the pavement. Those trolleys could have had elephants attached to them for all we cared – nothing would have stopped us getting our beer home.

  In between trips to the supermarket, we were also busy trying to keep our TV career afloat. After all the furore – or the mild bit of attention – we’d got from Beat the Barber, we’d had a meeting with the BBC, and their policy was very clear: ‘We want to keep you, but you’ve got to tone it down.’ Our policy was equally clear: ‘We’re not going to tone it down, so we’re leaving you.’ We’d often thought about flirting with other channels behind their backs, but this time we went the whole hog and committed to a full-blown relationship with another broadcaster.

  At the time, Channel 4 was the home of the edgiest, riskiest shows on TV – The Word, TFI Friday and Countdown, to name but three. In our first meeting with them, we asked Lucinda Whiteley, who was the Head of Children’s, if they’d let us shave people’s hair off. Her response? ‘You can shave their pubes for all we care!’ That was good enough for us, and we signed a deal with Channel 4. We also started our own production company, the cunningly titled Ant and Dec Productions. We were twenty-one, we had a new TV deal and we were the managing directors of our own TV company.

  I hate us, don’t you?

  November of that year marked my twenty-first birthday, and I had a surprise party, which was organized by my mam and Davey and held at FM’s bar in the centre of Newcastle. I was really pleased that my dad was invited, as it was the first time I’d seen him for a few years – it was a big surprise, even at a surprise party. It was a bit awkward at first, but it worked out fine. He told me that he’d sit away from everyone and keep himself to himself. He said he wasn’t there to cause a scene, just to say happy birthday and tell me he was very proud of me, which I appreciated.

  In a way, that night sums up my relationship with my dad. We still talk from time to time, but he doesn’t try and force his way into my life. I know that, down the years, he’s been offered money by newspapers to talk about me, and he could have made a tidy penny, but he’s always turned them down. He’s a plumber, and there’ve been times when he’s been out of work and the money would have come in handy, but he’s never done it – and I respect him for that. I know that, one day, we’ll probably see each other more regularly. My sister Sarha’s started seeing him since she had her son, Ethan, and I completely understand why, because whatever’s happened, Ethan is my dad’s grandson.

  The highlight of the evening came about an hour into the party. An enormous – and clearly cardboard – cake was wheeled towards me, and everyone started singing. I remember thinking, ‘What is this? Am I the only one who’s spotted that this cake is made of cardboard?’ The singing ended, and I was getting ready to thank everyone when I noticed that something inside the cake was moving. For my twenty-first, I’d asked for a boxer, and I thought, ‘Great, they’ve got me the dog.’ The top of the cake flew off and I couldn’t believe it when Lisa, who I’d been told had had to stay back home in Oxford, jumped out. Wearing a Newcastle United shirt. It was a fantastic surprise. I was over the moon, while at the same time thinking, ‘I really wanted that dog.’

  In the same month as Ant’s birthday, we released another single, ‘When I Fall in Love’, which hit number twelve. It seemed as though our new projects were working out very nicely, thank you. Despite our new image and our honesty in interviews, it hadn’t affected our record sales too much. We had a new series on Channel 4 about to launch, and things were looking better than they had for a long time.

  We didn’t know it yet but, within twelve months, the whole thing would collapse around our ears.

  Chapter 17

  Tuesday 18 February 1997.

  It’s a date that’s etched on quite literally no one’s brain, but that was when our new show with Channel 4, Ant and Dec Unzipped, first hit the front rooms of Great Britain. The show went out every Tuesday at six, but because we were so busy completely reinventing British pop music, I can hardly remember a thing about it. Still, at least that’s something we’ve got in common, eh, readers? Here’s what I can recall: Conor McAnally was back on producing duties and Dean Wilkinson was writing for us, but there was one big problem with the show: rebellion. Or a complete lack of it, to be precise.

  Ripping up the rulebook was a lot easier on BBC1 at 5 p.m. than it was on Channel 4 at 6 p.m. Channel 4 probably didn’t even have a rule-book and, if they did, it would have been torn to pieces long before we arrived. Channel 4 was so edgy that nothing we did seemed particularly risqué. The idea for the show was that me and Dec lived together in a flat, although at least we knew where the dishwasher was in this one. We were joined by celebrity guests and, each week, we put on a different show – one week might be a costume drama, the next a whodunnit, and so on – and by ‘and so on’, I mean that’s all I can remember. In many ways, the guests we had reflected our tastes at the time – there was Neil Hannon, the lead singer from the Divine Comedy, a great songwriter and someone whose work we really admired. And then there was Jo Guest. She was a topless model – and we admired her work too.

  Although we didn’t feel it was our finest hour or, to be more precise, ten half-hours, the show still won a Children’s BAFTA. Then something happened that’s very common in telly – everyone changed jobs. It’s just the way the industry works – I mean, it’s not as if people would change their whole job just to avoid working with us… is it? After ten shows of Unzipped, we went for a meeting at Channel 4, and it was less ‘Hi, guys, what do you want to do next?’ and more ‘Hi, guys, here’s your leaving present.’ After one series, our time at Channel 4 looked like it was coming to an end.

  We decided to take solace in song, and we went back to our music career. Fortunately, Telstar were about to put out The Cult of Ant and Dec, from which we’d already released two singles. There was a general election called for 1 May 1997, and we held a big launch party for the album at Chelsea Town Hall on the same night. Anyone who’s anyone was there, or at least anyone who didn’t give a toss about politics – I know Sophie Dahl and a policeman definitely turned up, because I had my picture taken with them. I still can’t believe Tony
Blair didn’t make it, mind, apparently he had ‘better things to do’.

  All night at the party, you’d hear the same sentence: ‘Who’s going to get to Number Ten?’ I remember thinking, ‘I’m hoping for top five, to be honest.’

  The album came out, and we released our third single, ‘Falling’. A tour followed, with a live band, which was a different experience for us. We could interact with them on stage; we could drink with them after the show; and the whole thing made us feel like proper musicians. Despite the fact we toured and did monstrous amounts of promotion, though, The Cult of Ant and Dec didn’t do well.

  In hindsight, we probably confused the audience a bit. We were trying to go a bit more Cigarettes and Alcohol and a bit less Teddy Bears and Chocolates, and it just wasn’t working out. We sold around 60,000 albums, which, considering the first album had shifted over half a million, wasn’t what you’d call progress. We ended up a bit like the England football team at the previous summer’s European Championships – we came up short in the quest for success. That’s where the similarity ends, by the way: we weren’t managed by Terry Venables – he’s a great football coach, but try asking him to get you a spot on Top of the Pops – it’s a complete waste of time.