Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (6 page)

Within a few months I was going out with Jill’s onscreen younger sister. Her character name was Debbie, and she was played by Nicola Bell.

It sounds like something from
Jeremy Kyle,
doesn’t it? ‘Help! I can’t stop dating sisters from
Byker Grove.
’

Apparently, according to the cast gossip, or Dec, as it was otherwise known, Nicola had fancied me for a while. We got talking at a party one night, and Nicola looked really pretty, and I think that was when we had our first kiss. Miraculously, unlike the previous effort, the kiss didn’t lead to me being dumped the next day. Nicola was my first love, and our relationship really blossomed, helped by the fact we didn’t see a single Kevin bloody Costner film the whole time we were together. It was great having a romance with someone you saw on set every day – and Nicola was certainly a lot better looking than Keith the cameraman, who was lovely, but just not my type.

It was going really well, and everyone was really happy for us – until our characters started going out with each other on the show. And then the unthinkable happened – there was a scene where we had to kiss. I know what you’re thinking ‘
Kiss
your
own
girlfriend? What next, wear your own clothes? Eat your own lunch?’

The whole thing was hilarious…

You might think I’m overreacting, but stop for a moment and imagine yourself as a teenager kissing your first boyfriend or girlfriend, and then imagine that being televised. See? I had sleepless nights for weeks before we filmed it. I was worried people would question my technique, or that they would tease me.

When the day came, the cast and crew ribbed us all morning. It was the last thing to be filmed before lunch. I assume that, if it was done after lunch, they were worried about people being sick. We both anxiously sat on set, cringing whenever the director called out ‘Action!’ When he finally did, the kiss was fine. We had to do a couple of takes, though, and each time the director yelled ‘Cut!’, we immediately stopped kissing and giggled nervously, which was daft, considering we were going out with each other anyway. Like so many things in life, the anticipation was much worse than the event itself.

Ant’s first date may have been
Dances With Wolves
, but I went for something a bit shorter that was horse-less and wolf-less. It was
Three Men and a Little Lady,
the disappointing sequel to
Three Men and a Baby
. My companion was a girl called Lynne. I’d met Lynne a few years earlier, at primary school. She was in the year above and widely regarded to be ‘the best-looking girl in the school’, and I can still remember asking her out. I got her phone number, rang her up, and after mumbling, ‘Is Lynne there?’ to her mam, she came on the phone.

‘Hi, Lynne, it’s Dec. Would you like to go to the pictures?’

‘Yeah, okay then.’

‘Great, ’bye.’

‘Bye.’

I put the phone down and punched the air with delight. I was over the moon, and then, after a couple of seconds, realized I hadn’t made any arrangements – I suppose I’ve never been any good at the finer details in life. I rang her back, and we agreed we’d go on Saturday. She was my first proper girlfriend, and we went out for a couple of months. I’d go round when she was babysitting her nieces, and we’d watch videos like
Ghost
and
Dirty Dancing
. Basically, if it had Patrick Swayze in, we watched it. I don’t really remember how our relationship finished – maybe there weren’t any Swayze films left to see, and the magic just went.

After my romance with Lynne, I looked further afield for love, unlike Ant. I wasn’t the kind of bloke who was happy to go out with someone just because they were in
Byker Grove
, I had my eyes on bigger things –
Grange Hill
. In 1990, on my second year on
Byker Grove
, the cast of the two biggest children’s dramas… on a weekday… afternoon… on BBC1 went head to head in a charity football match in Newcastle for Children in Need. I noticed a girl who I had only ever seen on the telly, and I tried to impress her with my dribbling. I quickly realized that it wasn’t working, so I wiped my chin and played football instead. That girl was Clare Buckfield, who played Natasha Stevens in
Grange Hill
, and I fancied her at first sight – I’m a real romantic like that, I’ve always believed in fancying at first sight.

Understandably, she didn’t really take any notice of me but, the following year, we went down to London for the return fixture of
Byker Grove
versus
Grange Hill
. After the game, we all went to the bar together, and the two of us got chatting. She said all the right things – ‘How’s the arcade-game addiction? When are you next on pirate radio?’, that kind of stuff – and we hit it off straight away. We all went on to another pub, and John Jefferson, who played Fraser, chatted up Clare’s sister, Julie, and in the process got her address. That’s right, not her phone number, her address. When the time came to leave, Clare told me to get her address from John, and that was how we stayed in touch. The telephone
had
been invented, I hasten to add, it was just addresses that were given out that night. Don’t ask me why.

I got home the next day, and decided to write Clare a letter. The only paper I had was
Byker Grove
notepaper, so I wrote it on that – classy or what? I can’t remember what I said in that letter, but after an agonizing two-day wait, she wrote back to me – I don’t think it was on
Grange Hill
-headed note-paper, but I didn’t mind too much. In the letter, Clare gave me her phone number, so we could stop acting like it was the 1920s and have an actual conversation, and that was the start of our relationship. We’d visit each other whenever we could – she’d come up on the coach with her sister, or I’d go down to London, and every day we’d write to each other. I’d spray my aftershave on the letters I sent, and she’d spray her perfume. It cost me a fortune in fragrance and stamps, but it was worth every penny. It all felt so romantic, and I was happy as Larry, whoever that Larry bloke is.

Anyhow, when Dec could tear himself away from a sheet of headed note-paper and a bottle of Blue Stratos…

Actually, it was Jazz.

Whatever. When he could tear himself away, the whole cast would often go on trips together. They were supposed to help new cast members bond with the regulars and to maintain a sense of camaraderie between the actors, but the predominant theme was underage drinking. They were brilliant – Paris, Rome, New York… were just some of the places we wanted to visit, but we always ended up going to the log cabins at Clennell Hall, near Rothbury, which was like another world – it was a full 31 miles from Newcastle.

The trips would usually be organized by Dee Wood, the head chaperone. I don’t know if we went to log cabins because Dee’s surname was Wood but, looking back, I’m just glad the trips weren’t organized by the other chaperone, Dave Sewage Farm.

When you get the whole cast of a children’s soap together for one night, they all want to do the same thing – sing, dance, act or, if you’re very unlucky, all three. Those nights could’ve been called
Byker’s Got Talent
, but without much talent.

When it came to the log cabins, one night in particular sticks in my mind. Me, Ant and Rory Gibson, who played Lee, had decided to do something together, but we couldn’t think of an act; we just had no idea what to do in front of an audience.

To be honest, it’s a problem me and Dec still face on a weekly basis…

The girls would always be singing – if you could call it that – ‘I will always love you’, and that kind of thing, but we wanted to do something different. The big problem was that neither me, Dec or Rory were great singers.

I was really into The Doors at the time and, suddenly, inspiration struck. The Doors were four American hippies in their twenties with long hair and leather trousers.

We were three teenage lads from Newcastle with gelled spiky hair and tracksuit bottoms. The similarities were uncanny.

We looked and sounded nothing like them, but we weren’t going to let a little thing like that hold us back – yes, tonight, Matthew, we were going to be The Doors.

Then we realized that we did have something in common with The Doors, something that was going to evoke the spirit of the sixties and help our performance no end.

Dec was wearing a beaded necklace.

I loved a beaded necklace in those days and wore one all the time. If we were lucky, people might actually think we
were
The Doors. As long as they didn’t have any eyes, or ears…

We decided to mime to ‘Light My Fire’, which, let me tell you, in a log cabin, was a risky choice. If any of the audience had taken it too literally, the whole place could’ve gone up. I told Ant to check where the fire exits were before we took to the stage.

Due to being the biggest Doors fan and the proud owner of their Greatest Hits CD, I took the part of Jim Morrison, while Dec and Rory used a cunning combination of tennis rackets and that beaded necklace to represent the rest of the band.

Before we went on, we’d had a band meeting and decided we needed a big finish. We were determined to do something that, in the true spirit of Jim Morrison, would have the girls in the audience screaming and fainting so, at the end of the song, we all tore our tops off. As soon as we did it, every girl in the place started screaming her head off.

I can still hear them now:

‘
Please,
please,
put your tops back on.’

Of course, we were only teenagers, our bodies hadn’t really developed then, it would take another few years before we’d be real men, with hairy chests and, of course, fully formed beer bellies.

Those trips away were fantastic. The boys would be in one cabin and the girls in another, and I would sneak out to the girls’ cabin at night to see Nicola for a quick snog. Those stolen kisses were exhilarating, they were forbidden and, best of all, they weren’t on telly.

That wasn’t the only time art – well,
Byker Grove –
imitated life. There’d be regular parties at the other cast members’ houses, and whoever’s house you went to, you could guarantee one thing: their parents were away.

The whole cast would turn up and, at times, it felt just like an episode of
Byker Grove.

Although off screen, I never started a pirate radio station.

And I never joined a religious cult.

Which was a shame – that beaded necklace would’ve gone a treat with a nice pair of pyjamas.

Chapter 5

Around late 1991 and at the beginning of 1992, our agent, Dave Holly, started getting requests for personal appearances at various roadshows.

Not for him – I mean, he was a lovely bloke, but he’d never been in
Byker Grove
and no one at those roadshows would have known who he was. No, the requests were for me and Dec. PJ and Duncan were becoming more and more popular and, by this point, the fanmail was coming in by the sackload. Hardly any of it was for us, the sacks weren’t that big and they weren’t always full, but we got a few letters and photos from girls, and it was a real thrill.

The requests for these personal appearances would often be for roadshows based around teen magazines.

One of the first ones me and Ant did was the
Fast Forward
Fun Day. It was put on by the BBC kids’ magazine
Fast Forward
, and it was a day of fun. You probably could have gathered that from the title, but I just wanted to make sure. It featured some of the biggest stars from the world of children’s TV, and I think we must have done a few interviews with the magazine beforehand. You know what those magazine features were like in the early nineties: favourite colour, favourite pop star, favourite member of the
Baywatch
cast, that kind of thing.

And, since you ask, my favourite was the stunner with the big chest.

David Hasselhoff?

That’s the one.

We’d turn up at these roadshows, along with other members of the cast. Whoever was hosting would say, ‘It’s the cast of
Byker Grove
,’ we’d all shuffle onstage, give the crowd a wave, maybe get asked a question or two, and young girls would scream. We’d always think two things – ‘This is great’ and ‘I must bring some earplugs next time.’ It was a bit like when
EastEnders
or
Coronation Street
wins an award and the whole cast wanders on to the stage and just stands there, not quite sure what to do with themselves.

There’d be metal barriers to keep the fans from storming the stage or, more likely, escaping from the venue and, after much waving, we’d go over to the barriers, have pictures taken with fans of the show and sign autographs. Of course, by now I was very experienced when it came to this sort of thing – I’d spend hours every week practising my poses in the mirror, and I’d been perfecting my autograph since the age of six. Now all I had to do was sign a copy of
Fast Forward
, rather than my maths exercise book.

A lot of the time the girls would also ask me to get Ant’s autograph for them too. This was because – and there’s no easy way to say this – they thought he looked miserable and they were scared of asking him themselves.

I must admit, I’ve got one of those faces. I do look miserable if I’m not smiling, and I was always a bit apprehensive at those things. I understood the girls wanted us to sign stuff, but if they didn’t shout ‘Ant’ or ‘PJ’, then I wouldn’t go over.