Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (31 page)

Without even realizing it, after
Pop Idol
, we returned to our first two jobs.

Paperboy and Irish dancing busker?

No, acting and singing. Look, you’ve interrupted my big end-of-chapter statement again.

Oh yeah, sorry.

Chapter 27

The success of
Pop Idol
led to us being offered all sorts of other projects. We returned to acting when we filmed a one-off sitcom for ITV –
A Tribute to the Likely Lads.
It was a remake of an episode of one of our favourite ever sitcoms,
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
We had to trim the title of our remake a bit, though, otherwise it would have been
A Tribute to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?,
and that’s just too long for the
Radio Times.
The original show starred James Bolam and Rodney Bewes and was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. It was brilliant. It’s the story of two best mates who are from Newcastle and live in Newcastle – ringing any bells?

To put it mildly,
The Likely Lads
is an institution in Newcastle and, when we announced we were doing it, the reaction from our fellow Geordies was simple and straightforward: they all said, ‘We can’t think of two better lads to do it but, whatever you do, make sure you don’t mess it up.’ Well, ‘mess it up’ wasn’t exactly the phrase they used, but you get the drift.

The two main characters, Bob and Terry, are very different – Bob is excitable and optimistic, while Terry is grumpy and disillusioned with the world. Can you guess who played who?

Will you stop saying that sort of thing, Declan? I’m really not that grumpy.

Careful – you sounded a bit grumpy there.

It co-starred John Thomson and was directed by the legendary comedy director Bob Spiers. We shot the episode on location in Newcastle and in a studio in London and it received mixed reviews, but the people who really mattered to us – the people of Newcastle – said nice things. And as long as our fellow Geordies were happy, then we could rest easy.

Another unexpected offer that came our way was from Sony Records, who approached us to make the official England World Cup single, for, well, for the World Cup, which that year was happening in Japan and South Korea. Our first reaction was very simple: ‘Didn’t you hear any of our music?’ But Sony weren’t joking; they genuinely wanted us to do it. Once we’d stopped laughing, we assumed they’d put us with ‘proper’ songwriters, the way Frank Skinner and David Baddiel had been paired with the Lightning Seeds, or the England Squad had worked with New Order in 1990, but Sony said, ‘No, we just want you two, and we’ve already chosen the song.’ It was an old terrace chant from the 1970s called ‘We’re on the Ball’. That was one less headache – we were worried for a minute that they might actually want us to write and compose the whole track.

We weren’t getting off lightly, though, we still had to write some new 2002 World Cup-inspired lyrics, but we were incredibly busy, and there appeared to be no free time in our diary to actually write the song. Eventually, we managed to clear a couple of hours one afternoon after a Variety Club lunch…

That is
the
most old-school-showbiz thing I’ve ever heard you say.

Thank you. So, there we were – Ant and I had a couple of hours to spare, an instrumental version of the track, a pen, some paper, and there was no point in putting it off any longer: it was time to get serious. To write the lyrics, we decided to go to a place that was quiet, disused and had been deserted for years – my kitchen. Once we were in there, the songwriting magic came flooding back, and inspiration immediately struck.

What he means is, we wrote down a list of footballing clichés, picked out the ones that rhymed, then chucked in a verse about the players, and we were done.

What can I say? Some people are just born songwriters. And us two definitely aren’t some of those people. After spending literally minutes on the lyrics, it was time for the next big part of the project: shooting the video. The story, and I use that word in the loosest possible sense, was that we were trying to blag our way to the World Cup in Japan by kidnapping the England manager Sven Goran Eriksson and his assistant Tord Grip and posing as impostors.

The FA had promised us access to the players – we could do some filming with David Beckham, Michael Owen, Steven Gerrard and the rest of the squad. That turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth. We never got any access to the players, and we ended up sat in a minibus outside Elland Road, in Leeds, where the whole squad were training, and didn’t get so much as a picture with them.

It wasn’t all bad news though – we got to work with Mike Hedges, who’d produced albums by the likes of Radiohead and U2. And now, to that list, he could finally add the artists formally known as PJ and Duncan – all that time messing about with nobodies like them must have been worth it when he got to work with us.

As part of the promotion, ‘the record company thought it was a good idea’ to perform live on
cd:uk
. ‘We’re on the Ball’ had a brass section on it, and we’d asked Phil Mount, our close friend and the show’s producer, to book a brass band to have on stage with us. He said no. That would cost money, and he wasn’t prepared to spend cash on a backing band for a couple of presenters who six months earlier had been hosting the show themselves. ‘Charming,’ we thought, although we did come up with an ingenious plan. Si Hargreaves, our press officer, came down with a bunch of guys from the office, and they all pretended they knew how to play trumpets. It turned out that what they actually knew how to do was drink a lot before the show and then mime badly on the telly. In their defence, they did at least get drunk on Becks, and with David Beckham as England captain, I thought that was very patriotic of them.

Once we’d recorded the track, shot the video and done the bare minimum of promotion, there was just one thing left to worry about – the singles chart. It felt strange to be back in the world of record sales and chart positions, but we quickly got swept up in the excitement of the whole thing. Before we go on, a quick quiz question to see if you’ve been paying attention: can you remember what our highest chart position was as pop stars? And for a bonus point, which track was it? You give up, don’t you? It was ‘Rhumble’ and it was number nine.

As ‘We’re on the Ball’ got more airplay and more press, we started to think we might eclipse our number-nine smash. Our imagination quickly ran away with us and we started to dream about having our first ever number one. We figured that it would sell plenty through sheer patriotism – after all, it was the official World Cup single, everyone had flags on their cars and in their windows, and football hysteria was sweeping the nation. Maybe, just maybe, that hysteria would have one other side effect: people wouldn’t be able to tell awful music from good music – and they’d buy our single.

We were so convinced we’d top the chart that we both started planning to buy
Music Week
, the industry’s trade paper, and have it framed. The whole thing was very exciting. And then the news came through.

Will Young, the winner of
Pop Idol,
and one of the most popular artists in the country, was releasing his second single, that cover of ‘Light My Fire’ that had done so much to win him the show. It was a dead cert to be number one and, in that moment, our dreams went up in smoke. Smoke that came from Will Young lighting his fire.

We ended up charting at number three, with Will Young at number one and Ant’s old friend from the Brits, Eminem, at number two. We’d tried acting and we’d tried singing, and the results were clear – get back to doing what we did best. It was time for some more messing about.

Chapter 28

Our next project can be summed up in three words, three words that in 2002 were very unfashionable.

‘Turquoise shell suit’?

Saturday-night telly. Back then, in the olden days of the early twenty-first century, there was a lot of talk about Saturday-night telly – and that talk was about it becoming extinct – like dodos, or white dog poo. Admittedly,
Pop Idol
had been a big hit, but that was the exception that proved the rule. A lot of people thought that the internet, multichannel TV and DVDs meant there was no place for big entertainment shows. They thought it was no longer possible to make a big, ambitious Saturday-night show that the whole family would sit around and watch together, so we did the obvious thing – we made a big Saturday-night show for the whole family to sit around and watch together. Or at least we hoped they would.

When it came to developing a new show – ‘developing’, incidentally, is another one of those fancy TV terms, this time for ‘coming up with a whole load of ideas in the hope that one of them sticks’ – by far the best idea was something that came from Granada Entertainment. When we heard it, we knew straight away that this was the programme we wanted to do. The main strand of the show was that we would give away the products that featured in adverts. It’s very simple, and it had never been done before – people play a gameshow to win the stuff that’s advertised on the telly.

It was also – and this is always a bonus for anything on ITV – the show the BBC couldn’t make because, as the TV experts among you will have noted, the BBC don’t show any adverts.

In case you hadn’t guessed by now, this was the show that became
Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway,
which has gone on to run, at the last count, for nine series. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Nine series, and we still haven’t collapsed from a heart attack with all the running around we do on set.

We took this idea and, with the help of some key personnel, or clever telly people, built a show round it. This was the zoo show we’d been waiting years to make, and me and Ant worked so hard to get it right. Along with Duncan Gray, the show’s executive producer, Nigel Hall, the producer of the first series, Siobhan Greene, the development producer who helped put the show together, and Leon Wilde, who was part development and part producer, we came up with a collection of mini-formats that formed the basis of
Saturday Night Takeaway.

We also brought in a director who has been stuck with us ever since – Chris Power. As well as directing
Takeaway
, he also does
I’m a Celebrity…
Our relationship with Chris is probably best summed up by us two, about five minutes before a live TV show, saying to him, ‘Can we just change this massive thing that’s really complicated into another massive thing that’s even more complicated?’ and him, miraculously, saying, ‘Yeah, all right,’ no matter what it is. Those kind of skills means he’s the perfect director for a show like
Takeaway
because, from the first script on a Tuesday to the actual show on a Saturday, it’s like Madonna – it never stops changing.

We wanted to make each show an ‘event’, a special piece of live telly, and along with the production team, we worked very hard to put as much different stuff into the show as possible. This meant that as well as Win the Ads, there were also items like Jim Didn’t Fix It, where we’d surprise someone in our audience who’d written a letter to Jimmy Saville as a child and then help them realize their ambitions as an adult. For this poor member of the audience, the whole thing could be very embarrassing. It’s one thing wanting to dance with overweight dance troupe the Roly Polys when you’re a kid in the eighties, but doing it twenty years later as an adult on live TV is a very different kettle of fish.

This was also the beginning of a fundamental element of
Takeaway
– surprising members of the audience. And, let me assure you, these surprises are planned with military precision, by a brilliant and very dedicated team. They know everything about the people in our audience. Put it this way, if Bin Laden had written to
Jim’ll Fix It,
they’d find out, track him down and, before he knew what had hit him, he’d be singing wth Chas ’n’ Dave live in the studio. We also littered the show with sketches, monologues, star guests, prize giveaways and something called Banged up with Beadle, which was a mini reality show where, every week, a member of the public
would spend seven days living in a naval fort just off the coast off Portsmouth with the late, great TV prankster, Jeremy Beadle.

Hosting an episode of
Saturday Night Takeaway
is the biggest buzz on telly. There are so many different things going on in the show, so much to remember and so many different roles for us to play, it’s like a rollercoaster – it’s a huge thrill and, once it starts, you can’t get off. We’re live on air for seventy-five minutes, so you have to see the journey through, no matter what twists and turns it takes.

Takeaway
could also be described as a circus show, because it’s got all the elements you’d find under the big top: excitement, jeopardy, danger and comedy. At least I think that’s why it’s called a circus show – either that or it’s because it’s got a pair of clowns hosting it.

Every show starts with us two at the top of the studio stairs, surrounded by the audience within the studio, then we run down those stairs and on to the stage. Even the way we handle that tells you a lot about us. We might be about to do a live TV show, but I like to shake hands with everyone on the way down the stairs – it’s a lovely thing to do with the wonderful people who’ve made the effort to come and be there.