Ooh! What a Lovely Pair: Our Story Read online

  I learnt a very valuable lesson that day, a lesson any younger readers would do well to heed – make sure your money goes into your bank account, and not your mam’s.

  Shouldn’t that be ‘Be responsible and don’t squander your money’?

  Oh yeah, that as well, yeah.

  All in all, I learnt a lot from that spending and, in a way, I was glad it happened.

  I wasn’t – I had to lend him £100 for Christmas presents.

  That’s what being a teenager is all about, isn’t it? Wasting your money, hanging around with your mates and, of course, drinking.

  My first real experience of drinking came at a family party when I was sixteen. It was a christening, and it was a very special day. I was so thrilled by a new addition to the family, so overjoyed at the gift of life, that I decided to celebrate… by drinking loads of lager.

  The problem was we had a lot of filming to do the next day, but that didn’t stop me putting away three pints – yes, three whole pints. Drinking that amount at sixteen was no mean feat, especially given the added obstacle that no man actually enjoys the taste of beer when they first drink it. Despite that, I soldiered on – I’ve always been good with stuff like that.

  What, drinking?

  Yes.

  I arrived at work the next day and to say I felt sick, dizzy, sweaty and disorientated would be the understatement of the century. Your first hangover is like your first love – you never forget it.

  I tried to struggle through at work but, in the end, the producers sent me home – with suspected alcohol poisoning.

  It seemed like a fancy name for a hangover, but I didn’t care, I got to go home and sleep it off, and that was all that mattered.

  When I heard the words ‘alcohol poisoning’, right there and then I knew one thing – me and Dec were going to be friends for life…

  We started spending more and more time together, and now that we were older, we started going out to concerts or, as you’re contractually obliged to call them as a teenager, gigs. Our first one was the Inspiral Carpets at Newcastle Mayfair, and it was absolutely brilliant. The first hurdle of the night was always getting past the bouncers – being in a children’s drama meant people looked on you as, well, a child, but it seemed like the bouncers didn’t even watch Byker Grove.

  They looked more like Children’s Ward fans to me…

  Not only did the bouncers let us in, we were always left alone at indie gigs too. There was a good reason for that: the people there didn’t have a clue who we were either.

  We also went to a fantastic Jamiroquai gig at the Newcastle Riverside. I can still picture those venues now – the air thick with the smell of cigarette smoke, old beer and stale urine…

  They were really magical places.

  We loved both those bands and, years later, our paths crossed again. Clint Boon, from the Inspiral Carpets, wrote the theme tune to Engie Benjy – a children’s animation series that me and Ant provided the voices for.

  And people say we’re not rock ’n’ roll…

  We also interviewed Jay Kay (from Jamiroquai) at his house for cd:uk. It was a huge country mansion in Buckinghamshire, and we had a great day. We played on his quad bikes and mini motorbikes, but never got the chance to try on his giant hats – unfortunately.

  When we weren’t going to gigs, we’d go to bars in town. Whatever it took to perfect the art of alcohol poisoning, we were prepared to do it. It was harder to be anonymous in pubs though. We would often get recognized, and that nickname that followed us around for years would come out: ‘those two poofs off the telly’.

  One year, after a premiere, me, Dec, Nicola, Jill and John went into town for a few drinks and, when a few members of the cast went out together, well, you were asking for trouble.

  You may as well have gone up to the bar and said, ‘Three pints, a Bacardi and coke and, if it’s not too much trouble, could you find someone who’d like to beat me up, just so I can get it out of the way early?’

  We were walking from one bar to another and a stocky lad in his late teens came up to me and asked me to take off my trousers. I thought, ‘That’s quite a chat-up line,’ but I said no, I was using them and I had no intention of standing in the middle of town in my underpants. He asked again – ‘Give me your trousers’ – and I said no again. Then, surprise, surprise, the truth came out – the trouser request had been a red herring to distract from the main point of this encounter: he wanted to punch me in the face. After having the – pardon the pun – bare-faced cheek to keep my own trousers on, well, in his opinion, I was asking for it. And he gave it to me, in the form of a black eye.

  It didn’t go down very well at home – my mam hit the roof because, as she quite rightly pointed out, I should have run away, or just done anything but get punched in the face. The make-up girls at work weren’t too pleased either: I was now doing a convincing impression of a bloke who was half man, half panda, and it made their job much harder. The next time I went out in town I wore two pairs of trousers, just to be on the safe side.

  I really felt for Ant but, at the same time, I was glad the lad hadn’t gone for me. Clare was with me on one of her visits from London, and we were walking a few metres behind, so the lad just got to him first. Plus, my trousers weren’t as nice as Ant’s.

  It has to be said, I was also capable of bringing trouble on myself on a night out, like the time we went out for Boppa’s eighteenth birthday. I had a lot of scenes to do the next day, so the sensible thing to do was take it easy and have an early night. I decided to go for the other option, which was to get blind drunk. We went to the same pub we’d been going to for a couple of years and, as we were all saying ‘Happy eighteenth’ to Boppa, you could see the landlord looking at us thinking, ‘Happy eighteenth? Hang on, I’ve been serving these kids for two years…’

  Then, towards the end of the night, not content with consuming our own body weight in lager, we decided it was time to move on to the spirits, and Boppa got a drink called ‘The Top Shelf’

  Oh no.

  Oh yes.

  The experienced pub-goers among our readers are already ahead of me here. This drink contained every single spirit from the top shelf in the same glass – vodka, Bacardi, Baileys, whiskey – you name it, it was in that glass – and we all had to down one. Well, I say, ‘had to’, we didn’t have to, but we were all obeying the first law of teen life: if your mates tell you to do something, you do it, no matter how stupid, reckless and hangover-inducing it might be.

  At the end of the night, I staggered home and did what everyone does at some point in their teenage years – I threw up all over my bedroom.

  I woke up the next morning with a puzzle to solve. How had someone managed to break into my room and hit me over the head with a hammer for eight hours solid?

  I felt absolutely dreadful. My head was banging, and the phone was ringing. It seemed louder than usual but, frankly, so did everything. I finally answered it, and it was the production office at Byker Grove, demanding to know why I was an hour late for filming. I’d forgotten all about it. To be honest, it was a miracle I’d even remembered where I lived.

  I jumped up, begged Sarha to help me clean my room, had a shower and got to the shoot. We were heading to location, and I got on the minibus and sat next to Dec. I thought, ‘At least my best mate’ll be sympathetic, he’ll help me get through this and give me a shoulder to cry on.’ I was wrong.

  He just took one look at me and said…

  ‘You absolutely stink!’

  And he did, he stank of Baileys, and pretty soon, the whole mini bus stank of Baileys – all the way to location. And this wasn’t any ordinary location.

  We were filming at the Junior Great North Run. And we were dressed as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

  I’ll just repeat that, in case you thought your eyes were playing tricks on you.

  We were filming at the Junior Great North Run.

  And we were dressed as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
.

  And I stank of Baileys.

  I considered jumping out of the moving minibus to try and get out of it, but in the end I decided there was no choice, I’d just have to try and get through the shoot.

  We were dressed as turtles because PJ and Duncan were doing the run in fancy dress for charity, and we didn’t even have proper turtle outfits, because they were supposed to look homemade. So we had to wear white boiler suits made out of paper and painted green, homemade shells on our backs and turtle masks from a joke shop. The only thing greener than those turtle outfits was Ant’s face.

  We put the costumes on and jumped out of the minibus into the middle of a baking-hot day and thousands of people warming up for the run.

  I turned to Ant and said, ‘Cowabunga dude, Turtle Power!’

  I won’t repeat what I said back to him.

  Chapter 6

  ‘He cannot see, can he? He can’t see, man!’

  Not my words, but the words of my character, Duncan, immediately after his best mate, PJ, had been blinded in a horrific paintball accident.

  It was definitely the most memorable storyline we were involved in on Byker Grove and, even now, nearly twenty years on, I still get people coming up to me and mentioning it. In fact, if you’re reading this and you bump into me in the future, desperate to check how I am, all I’ll say is my eyes are okay, my vision is fine and I haven’t been paintballing since, thanks for asking.

  It all happened towards the end of our time on the show, and we both took it very seriously. The plot was basically that, during a paintball contest between Byker Grove and rival youth club Denton Burn, PJ took off his mask to warn his mate Noddy – played by Brett Adams – about a shot that was coming towards him, when not one, but two paintballs were fired into his eyes. How’s that for bad luck? To make it even more tragic, the shots came from the two girls PJ was seeing at the same time. He was involved in a love triangle with Debbie, played by Nicola, who was still my real-life girlfriend, and Amanda, played by Gemma Graham. As a result of the accident, PJ lost his sight and his girlfriend, but his best mate Duncan vowed to help him through his ordeal.

  The producers had a long chat with me and Dec and explained the size and importance of the storyline and how we’d need to do some research.

  As I mentioned before, Byker Grove had a history of tackling serious issues, like teenage pregnancy or gay kisses (we weren’t involved in that one by the way), and when they covered these subjects, it was always done in a very professional way.

  Other than Dec dabbling with arcade-game addiction, this was the first time we were asked to do proper research for one of these issue stories, so we knew this wasn’t your normal pirate-radio-starting, cult-joining stuff: this was a big deal.

  We went to a school for the blind in Newcastle and spoke to some kids who’d been able to see and had then lost their sight. And what came across was that a lot of them, understandably, were quite angry and frustrated, and that was definitely something that I tried to put into my performance. Another part of our research involved meeting a mobility officer, who taught me how to use a cane and Dec how you guide a blind person. She also taught me how to sit, stand and cross the road in the way a partially sighted or blind person would. She even blindfolded me and made me cross a busy road in Newcastle, using only my sense of hearing. It was the most demanding thing we’d faced in our short careers and the story dominated that series.

  To add to the drama, Duncan ended up in the arms of Debbie, PJ’s girlfriend. She was wracked with guilt after the accident, and Duncan comforted her. With kissing. It was pretty strange kissing Ant’s girlfriend, but it was all in the name of acting, and now that we weren’t sawing people in half or unicycling, this was the sort of challenge that came with the job, and we just had to deal with it. It was also my first screen kiss, which added to the pressure, but Ant helped to prepare me and told me what it would be like – not what it would be like kissing his girlfriend, but doing an onscreen kiss.

  It was fine for me, the three of us were all mates anyway, and I was just thankful I didn’t have to do it myself. Kiss Debbie, that is, not Dec – that would have been very unpleasant. The love triangle and the blindness meant we had some seriously meaty stuff to get our teeth into, although there were still a few lighter moments within it all.

  After he left hospital, there was a scene where PJ went home and was greeted by his mam, which obviously meant an actress was required to play the part. Now, normally, the producers would cast an experienced thespian in a demanding role like this one, but on this occasion they decided to break with tradition and cast a complete unknown, someone who’d never done any acting in her life. That someone happened to be my mam.

  It was an odd experience having her on set. Imagine bringing your mam to work with you – I half expected her to tell the director to eat his greens or shout at the props girl for not tidying up.

  Then again, when it came to playing the role of bringing up a grumpy teenager who looked uncannily like me, well, my mam had been playing that part for several years, so she was perfect for it.

  In the scene, PJ’s mam just had to open the door and let him in, she didn’t have to say anything. After a couple of takes, it was clear something was bothering her. Just as we were about to have another go at recording the scene, she stopped.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said in front of the assembled crew. ‘If I was PJ’s mam, I’d speak to him. He’s just got out of hospital, hasn’t he? I’d tell him I loved him, or give him a kiss or a cuddle or something, otherwise I’m going to look heartless!’

  I couldn’t believe it. She wanted to find out her character’s motivation and improvise dialogue. Although, to be fair, she was absolutely right – and the director learnt a lesson then and there that I’d learnt as a small child: don’t mess with my mam.

  Her performance was great and, shortly afterwards, she went on a one-woman-theatre tour as ‘PJ’s Mam’. (That last bit’s not true.)

  By now, the show was into its fifth series, and PJ’s blindness was the main thing going on, which meant me and Ant were given a lot of screen time. In an attempt to take PJ’s mind off the accident, the lads formed a band – Grove Matrix – because, of course, as any doctor worth their salt will tell you, the best cure for blindness is forming a boy band. The band consisted of me and Ant, plus three other lads who hadn’t really been our mates in the series but were obviously very musical. They were Barney, who played keyboards, Marcus, who played, er, keyboards and Frew, who just danced – he was our Bez.

  We even got to record a real song, in a real recording studio. It was called ‘Tonight I’m Free’ and was written by Richie Wermerling, who was the lead singer of a band called Let Loose.

  Nicky Graham was going to produce it. He had written and produced tracks for Bros, and he came up to Newcastle to produce ‘Tonight I’m Free’ for us. There was a slight problem when we got into the studio and discovered we weren’t exactly the best singers in the world, but after pushing a few buttons and twiddling a few knobs, we sounded, well, almost okay.

  We did miss one trick when it came to the band performing the track on the show. We came out to a rapturous welcome and, naturally, PJ was helped on to the stage with his white cane. Once the track started, though, he miraculously took part in the full, energetic dance routine, despite the fact he supposedly couldn’t see a thing. It wasn’t the most realistic moment in TV history, but I’d learnt those dance moves, and I was damned if I was going to let that go to waste.

  Things couldn’t have been going any better: we’d recorded a song, we were the main characters in the show and we were even getting quite a bit of fanmail. We were so happy, we were doing cartwheels.

  Not literally, I’ve always had a bad back, and it just wouldn’t have been sensible.

  Then, one day, we were called up to Matthew Robinson’s office for a chat about the next series. I can still picture that office now – it was at the back of the Mitre, and I always thought it was v
ery small for the executive producer, which was what Matthew was by then. We sat down, and he swung round on his swivel chair – like a Bond villain, but without the cat to stroke, or the dastardly plan to take over the world. He told us that our characters were hugely popular, and the show was getting great ratings. ‘This meeting’s going pretty well,’ we thought. But, apparently, Byker Grove was being watched by too many older kids. It was getting a big audience, but it was the wrong audience. The BBC was very keen to introduce some younger characters, and lower the average age of the viewers.

  ‘Good idea,’ we said. ‘We look forward to working with them next year – we can show them the ropes, give them a few tips – it should be fun.’

  He looked at us with a pained expression and explained that PJ and Duncan wouldn’t be coming back. They were too old for a show about a youth club; this was the end of the line. Matthew told us he’d argued with the BBC, he’d tried to keep us, and had even suggested a spin-off show, but the big cheeses at the Beeb had quickly spotted the shortcomings of a drama about a blind boy and his heartbroken best mate. There would be a few more scenes in this series, and then PJ and Duncan would leave the show. I was stunned at the news, and I started to feel sick.

  We were both in shock. Matthew shook our hands, wished us luck and thanked us for taking it like men, then we left his office. We walked down the corridor together, side by side and in total silence, past the production offices, which were still buzzing, full of staff and crew getting on with their jobs, oblivious to the fact that our world had been shattered.