Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Read online

  Thanks to a long career in local theatre and panto, plus some TV work, Billy was a household name in the North-east. Our parents knew who he was, and the two of us certainly looked up to him.

  Although, back then, we looked up to most people – we were even smaller than we are now…

  Byker Grove was a very well-run production, very professional, and a lot of that was down to Matthew Robinson, the producer. To us, he was the godfather of the whole thing. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t put a horse’s head in PJ’s bed or anything, but you knew he was definitely in charge. He directed the first six episodes and a lot of the following series, and he always had a bit of an aura about him. For a start; he’d come up from London or, to give it its proper title in Geordie, ‘that London’, or if you’re over eighteen, ‘that bloody London’. He’d worked on EastEnders, during the golden era of Den, Angie and, of course, Ethel’s little Willy, and that immediately impressed everyone.

  And, let’s be honest, impressing people with a little Willy isn’t easy…

  When Matthew started on Byker Grove, he made a major announcement: no stage-school kids. Because he’d worked on EastEnders, whenever he made a major announcement it was followed by the sound of drums going duff, doof, duff, dufff, duff d-d-d-d-doof. That was the EastEnders theme tune, by the way, which isn’t easy to type. Matthew was adamant that he wanted children from real, working-class backgrounds like ours, and that was really admirable.

  Matthew taught me, Dec and the rest of the cast so much, including how to actually act, which, looking back, is kind of vital when you’re making a drama. He also taught us how to use pauses… which… was… great.

  See? I’ve still got it.

  Pacing yourself was really important, because when you first get a group of kids reading a script together, it all sounds like this:

  ‘HeyPJfancygoingtothegrovetoseeSpuggieandhaveawater fightbeforewegototheshopsintown?’

  He also taught us how to work together as actors, and how to get the mood of a scene right. And when you have huge storylines, like going to the shops in town, or going to the shops near the Grove, that kind of stuff is crucial. It’s got to be done with gravitas, with impact and with emphasis – in all the right places.

  Imagine the bit in Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader tells Luke Skywalker he’s his dad – it was like that, but with shops.

  Matthew had the patience of a saint – and he needed it, working with a bunch of hyperactive kids who’d never really done any acting before. He also lived and breathed Byker Grove, and he really took to Newcastle as a city. After about a year there, he could even speak some of the language. He would also be careful not to go on about London – sorry, ‘that London’ – all the time.

  The most important and valuable thing Matthew taught us, though, was professionalism. He treated us all like adults and made sure we understood that, when you were filming, you were at work, and time was money. We might have been kids, but we were getting paid, and there was a word for what we were doing. It was called a job, and he made sure none of us forgot that.

  That’s something that Dec and I have tried to maintain throughout our career: wherever we’ve worked and whatever we’ve done, we’ve always tried to be professional. Whether we’ve succeeded is another matter, but we’re always trying. And I know the people we work with now agree with that. We often overhear them saying that we’re both really, really trying…

  I also think that attitude has helped us two as a double act. If I’d been through Byker Grove and Ant hadn’t, or vice versa, our partnership would have been very different.

  The main reason for that is that we probably would never have met. Trust me, I’ve been doing this a long time now, and one of the hardest things in showbusiness is to form a double act with someone you’ve never met – in fact, it’s almost impossible.

  We owe Matthew and Byker Grove a huge debt and, these days, whenever we get complimented on our professionalism, we both think about Matthew and the whole Byker team, and how we’ve got them to thank for that.

  We don’t thank them out loud, obviously, we prefer to sit back and take all the credit ourselves, but we think it, and that’s the important thing.

  Seriously, though, we do want to say a big thank-you to every single person we worked with on Byker Grove. They laid the foundations for the rest of our career, and everything we learnt from them still helps us to this day.

  Chapter 3

  At the end of the first series, Matthew told me that the role of Duncan was going to get bigger and, naturally, I couldn’t wait to find out what kind of heavyweight storylines I’d be tackling. After all, I was a professional actor now, and I was desperate to show what I could do. I was waiting to discover what my first big, emotionally demanding story would be – and then, at last, all was revealed: I was going to be addicted to arcade games.

  Not even fruit machines, arcade games. Duncan was supposed to be sensible, he’d often be the voice of reason, but this storyline showed how even the most level-headed lad could be sucked into the murky world of arcade-game addiction. It wasn’t exactly gritty social drama, but I suppose it beat the water fights I’d been confined to in series one.

  In order to successfully convey my addiction, I had to go to the Metro Centre, a huge shopping centre in Gateshead, and play the driving game Chase HQ in one of the arcades there. I say ‘play’, but actually I’d just stand there, with a camera pointed at me, while I pretended to be chasing a criminal in a black Porsche 928. I didn’t even get to play for real. I was bored stiff. I was actually jealous of the kids who were just there for a day at the arcades. Meanwhile, the grumpy bugger had scored a big juicy storyline right from the start.

  I was setting up a pirate radio station. Just to be clear, that’s not a radio station for pirates – it wasn’t called Shiver Me Timbers FM, it was an illegal radio station.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d spent series one earning my stripes – a day at the Grove here, a trip to the fair there, and this new kid was straight into pirate radio. It was a much cooler story than anything I’d been involved in, and it showed what an edgy, risk-taking kind of guy this PJ really was. Part of me thought, ‘That’s great, Ant’s got a big story, I’m really chuffed for him,’ but the other 99 per cent of me thought, ‘That’s awful, Ant’s got a big story, I think I hate him.’

  In the end, Duncan was saved from the jaws of those evil arcades, and Declan was saved from the jaws of boredom. Geoff came and found him and persuaded him to go back to the Grove, putting a friendly arm round his shoulders and saying, ‘Come on, Duncan, lad, let’s get you home.’ That was one of his many catchphrases, along with, ‘Come on, PJ, lad, let’s get you home,’ and of course, ‘Come on, Spuggie, lass, let’s get you home.’ That was Geoff all over – he was always there to save you when you did something stupid, like pretending to play arcade games for hours on end. Although he could be strict too. There was one episode where all the lads went up to the attic in the Grove for a party, and he said, ‘No funny business, mind, or yous’ll all be down quicker than the first pint on a Friday night.’ It was one of the finest lines in the history of TV drama.

  The pirate-radio storyline was when PJ and Duncan had their first scenes together. The characters met when Duncan and the lads turned up at a radio station to record an advert for a jumble sale at the Grove. The ‘script’ they’d put together was pretty dull, but PJ the DJ turned it into…

  ‘Bargain’s bestsellers in bric-a-brac down at Byker Grove, I–I don’t believe it! Yes, they’re giving them away, well, almost – at the big, big Byker Grove bonanza – sale starts at two o’clock, so bowl on down to Byker Grove!’

  With that kind of verbal dexterity, it’s no wonder I became a rapper in later life.

  At the time, PJ was dressed in the coolest clothes around – Troop trainers, a cap and an 8-Ball jacket. I was wearing other stuff too, they wouldn’t have let anyone on kids TV dressed in nothing but trainers, a cap and a jacket – I wou
ld’ve got done for indecent exposure. But you get the picture.

  From then on, the characters became friends and, pretty quickly, so did me and Ant.

  I suppose in a way that was the start of our double act, although, even then, we didn’t know that PJ and Duncan would end up going together like bacon and eggs, bangers and mash, or fish and chips.

  All right, they get the point; you’re making me hungry…

  There was one defining moment that kickstarted our friendship properly, and it was all due to a deadly combination of Fred Flintstone and Newcastle United. I sent Dec a Christmas card in December of 1990 that said, ‘Have a Yabba-Dabba-Doo Christmas’ – I know, I know, but it was part of a multipack, okay? And I was only fifteen. Inside, it just said, ‘Happy Christmas, mate – have a good one. PS Fancy going to the Swindon match on Boxing Day?’ We went to the game, and it was the first time we’d socialized outside of Byker Grove gatherings. Boxing Day 1990 was our first date.

  Newcastle drew 1–1 with Swindon, thanks to a goal from Mickey Quinn. Before the match, we enjoyed the same pre-match routine as most teenage lads in Newcastle – meet at Grey’s Monument in the centre of town at one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, walk round the clothes shops on High Bridge looking at stuff we couldn’t afford, go to Greggs the Bakers for a pasty, then get inside the ground, at the Gallowgate end, nice and early, so we could get a good spot. And then, at five to three, when all the big blokes came out of The Strawberry, a pub near the ground, lose our spot and get thrown about the terraces.

  Back on Byker Grove, a pattern quickly emerged. PJ and Duncan, along with their mates on the show – Fraser, played by John Jefferson; Lee, portrayed by Rory Gibson; Speedy, aka Steven Bradley; and Craig Reilly, who was Winston – provided light relief to the main stories. While the girls would deal with issues like teenage pregnancy or child abuse, we’d be involved in trying to work out if the Grove was haunted.

  Which, by the way, it wasn’t – it was Paget the gypsy all along. That plot typified the relationship between PJ and Duncan. PJ was a maverick – he liked pranks and harebrained schemes – while Duncan was more level-headed. PJ wanted to break into the Grove and spend the night in there ghost-hunting, while Duncan suggested picking the locks. He was like the logistics man, definitely PJ’s partner in crime, but much calmer. In another early episode, Duncan discovered a ‘listening device’ and planted it in the girls’ toilets. He was a proper little James Bond, only without the flash cars. Or the girls. Or the licence to kill. It was more a licence to listen to girls and pick locks, really.

  When we weren’t chasing ghosts, or gypsies posing as ghosts, we were involved in yet more gritty social drama, like putting on a magic show when PJ decided to raise money for Robert’s physiotherapy. Dec sawed a girl in half – not for real, obviously, he did it via the gift of magic.

  In the same magic show I rode a unicycle – don’t ask me what’s magical about that, because I don’t know. All I do know is that it meant going to a church hall in Jesmond – a posh part of Newcastle – every Wednesday night and hanging around with a bunch of people from the circus who wore tie-dye clothes, had dreadlocks and were all juggling while smoking roll-ups. They were multi-skilled; I’ll give them that. I was in my hoodie and baseball cap, listening to loads of rap music at the time, and I would have given my right arm to saw someone in half, if you know what I mean.

  As well as the acting itself, which as you’ve gathered, was pretty high-octane stuff, there were so many other reasons to enjoy Byker Grove – the buzz of being on set, the joy of getting sent scripts but, more than any of that, there was something that gave us both a huge amount of pleasure and satisfaction.

  Time off school.

  The more scenes we were in, the more time off we had. There were rules about how many days a week you were allowed to miss – I think the maximum was three – and it was brilliant.

  Just stop now and imagine that you’re thirteen years old and you can miss three days a week of school.

  Nothing could have made us happier. Well, maybe five days a week off school, but there was no need to be greedy.

  Obviously, there was a tutor at Byker Grove, and by law we had to do three and a half hours’ schoolwork every day on set. The tutor would liaise with your teachers, get your course work and blah blah blah, who are we kidding?

  We got time off school.

  We tried our damndest to do as little schoolwork as possible, although we did both manage to get an excellent education in one subject – playing pool. There was a table in the actors’ green room at the Mitre, so we’d take the chance to play whenever we had a spare ten minutes between scenes.

  Realistically, we couldn’t have done a lot of homework on set because we’d be out and about so much for filming, and that had its downsides. Doing scenes in the west end of Newcastle, for example, wasn’t always easy. In fact, it was never easy. If you were shooting on the street, you’d often get kids hurling abuse at you. They’d use the kind of shocking, foul and disgusting language that, up until then, we’d only ever heard coming out of each other’s mouths. One of their favourite tricks was to wait until the director shouted ‘Action!’ and then shout ‘Wankers!’ at the top of their voice.

  It would always be left to some poor runner or work-experience girl to go over and politely ask them to be quiet. They’d always say, ‘Aye, no problem, pet, no problem,’ and then, of course, the minute the director shouted ‘Action!’ again, they’d start yelling ‘Wankers!’ again.

  Looking back, it’s actually quite funny but, back then, it was… actually, it was quite funny back then too – but it wasn’t the only disruption we had to deal with.

  Me and Dec were filming a scene next to a block of flats one day, and you wouldn’t believe some of the things people threw out of their windows at us – potatoes, eggs, tomatoes: there was almost enough for a full English some days. I nearly asked them to chuck down a bottle of ketchup and a couple of rashers of bacon. I always assumed the reason they threw that stuff was a combination of boredom and perhaps a bit of jealousy – to them, it might have looked like we had the most glamorous job in the world and were earning a fortune. The reality, though, was more like we were missing a few lessons at school and getting a bit of extra pocket money.

  Without a doubt, the worst day’s filming I ever had to do was when Duncan got mixed up in a cult. I’ll never forget it.

  The cult was called Psychandrics, and they brainwashed Duncan. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but there was a girl he fancied, and it was the old story: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy joins extreme religious cult to impress girl. We’ve all done it, haven’t we?

  He got really into it though. He was usually quite sensible but, every now and then, Duncan could be a damn fool – especially if there was a girl involved. We had to film these scenes at Grey’s Monument, which is right in the middle of Newcastle city centre and, for reasons that still escape me to this day, I had to do this while wearing what looked like a pair of pyjamas.

  P-jays and Duncan!

  Apparently, nothing says ‘cult’ like a pair of pyjamas. I don’t know what it was with me and pyjamas. A few weeks earlier, in a school swimming lesson, I’d retrieved a brick from the deep end wearing a pair – it seemed like the only thing I didn’t do in pyjamas was go to sleep. It was as if the producers had sat down and had a meeting where the theme was ‘Making Dec look as stupid as possible’, and they hit the jackpot with this one.

  Of course, when I heard Dec would be filming in the middle of town in a natty pyjama-style outfit, I did what any mate would do – got straight down there to have a proper laugh at him.

  As if this wasn’t enough, the director didn’t want to tell the general public we were filming so, in between takes, when the cameras weren’t there, I just looked like a boy in pyjamas standing on his own in the middle of Newcastle.

  They say the only things that are certain in life are death and taxes, but I can add another one to that
list, which is ‘If you’re wearing pyjamas in the middle of town, you’re guaranteed to bump into someone you know.’

  And I did. I saw several people who knew my mam and dad, and they’d stop for a chat, a chat which usually went something like this:

  ‘Are you Fonsey and Anne’s littl’un?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you still in that TV show?’

  ‘It’s funny you should say that actually, I’m filming it right now.’

  ‘Is that why you’re wearing them pyjamas?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, tell your mam I said hello.’

  ‘Will do. ’Bye.’

  To be fair, it was sometimes possible to have a laugh when you got recognized in town. When we used to meet up at the Monument on Saturday afternoons and go to the football together, we were so famous that sometimes as many as two people would come up to us and say, ‘You’re thingy and thingy from Thingy Grove, aren’t you?’

  And if one of us was waiting for the other, then…

  Hang on, that’s not right, what I really mean is, when I’d be waiting for Dec – which, incidentally, I’ve spent half my life doing… Why are you always late?

  Ah, there’s a good reason for that. It means I never wait for anyone… shall we talk about this later?