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They’ve been Tyneside Tykes on Byker Grove, Saturday saviours
on SM:TV; they console Pop Idol rejects and are the perfect recipe
for ITV’s Takeaway. Give it up for this year’s hosts
with the most.
Some TV presenters present TV. Others invent a game called Wonkey
Donkey, shave childrens’ heads for fun, innuendo their way
out of the kids’-telly ghetto to become the new Morecambe & Wise
and get handed a BAFTA, a new £3 million ITV contract, a
place inside Madame Tussauds’ (no pun intended) - and now
GQ’s TV Personality of the Year award. What higher accolade
could a pair of Tynseside scamps ever hope for?
You join us Live from the floor of the Cigar Room at No 5 Cavendish
Square, where Declan Donnelly (the short, funny one) and Anthony
McPartlin, (the short, funny one), are celebrating Their Amazing
Year.
‘We’re over the moon to have won, thanks to everyone
who voted,’ beams Dec. ‘We’ll be haing a few
drinks to celebrate, and everyone’s invited. Meet you this
Friday 7.30 at Pizza Hut, top the of the Bigg Market?’
Ant & Dec prove that genius can grow up next door and speak
with a Geordie accent. Twenty-eight apiece and affable in the extreme,
they were born to trifle. They make light of everything, heavy
weather of nothing and have built a career on making in-jokes that
somehow everyone can be in on. They project an almost-believable
impression of not knowing how all this came to be. There’s
a businesslike seriousness to Ant & Dec somewhere, but it’s
so deeply hidden among puns, giggles, petty insults and wisecracks
and as to be invisible. But you know it’s there.
Ant & Dec are kids who speak the language of adults, and adults
who live the life of kids. But ‘Kidult’ doesn’t
begin to describe their charm. They’ve remained permanently
loved, laughed-with and relevant because they’ve grown up
with their audience, who are only just beginning to tune in fully
with the light entertainment/heavy irony routine they honed at ‘SM:TV’,
the Saturday morning ‘hangover TV’ show made for six
year-olds but watched by the caned and unable.
Previously they’ve weathered ignominy in ‘Byker Grove’,
and boy-band infamy as PJ & Duncan. This Year they hosted ‘Pop
Idol’, and with ‘Saturday Night Takeaway’ legitimised
the remote control’s third button as the weekend’s
essential destination. Without their knowing commentary, ‘I’m
A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!’ would have just been some
vaguely famous people in a jungle on TV. There’s talk of
network deal in the US, and an Ant & Dec film (‘about
friendship and that’) in 2006. In short, they look like they’re
having a fun – about three million pound’s worth in
fact. ‘When you’ve done you done the celebrity thing,’ Ant
tells me, lighting another Regal, ‘we realised where we’re
happy – down the pub or with our girlfriends. We’re
quite happy in ourselves, which is a rare thing. There’s
a lot of screwed-up people on TV…’
Saturday Night Takeaway has raised Muckabout Telly to a level
of high art…
Ant: It’s the show we’ve always wanted to make - a
family entertainment show.
Dec: We’ve always wanted that slot. The six o’clock
teatime Saturday night, because those are the shows we loved watching
as kids. It was seen as a poisoned chalice. We were the first people
in a ages who’d knocked on the door and said, ‘give
it to us’. We (+i)love(-i) it.
Dec: Some people see entertainment as cheesy, a bit Noel Edmonds.
We’re like, yeah – totally!
It’s a fiendish timeslot because the audience demographic
is so broad. Can you appeal to everyone?
Ant: It’s unforgiving. We’ve got no ambitions
to go late-night, or be experimental. We want all that the whole
family to sit down together and enjoy the show. At the same time
you can do some surreal comedy. We’ve talked a lot about
the difference between innuendo and being vulgar, and we did push
it, I have to say. It’s just to give older people something
to smirk about. We’ve done 17 shows and we’re starting
to win the family audiences. Once we’ve got them, we can
push it more.
The next series will feature more than references to ‘love
custard’, then?
Dec: Innuendo is good as long as it has double meaning and it’s
not just ,’ooh, look at your cock.’
Ant: My favourite was getting Victoria Beckham to draw a pair
of boobs on a perspex sheet in a space sketch. We had two asteroids,
which were the nipples, and she had to draw our spaceship’s
trajectory. So obviously she ended up drawing two boobs and stood
behind the perspex. Of course she got it!
Dec: There are so many things you can do - but nobody’s
doing them.
You’ve go no competition…
Dec: No!
Meanwhile, the US is holding on line two. Do you think they will
they get you in America?
Dec: We said, but they won’t understand our humour?’ And
they said, ‘Hey, no problem!’ So we’ll give it
a try. If they don’t get it, we’ll just go, ‘we
told you they wouldn’t…’
Do you like Americans?
Ant: I don’t know any. We never had a career in America
doing the music, did we?
Dec: Oddly enough, no…
Do you still have a lot of international fans?
Dec: From the music, aye. We still get letters from Singapore
saying, ‘I heard you’re dead, are you?’
How do you respond to that?
Dec: I tend not to….
Your schedule is full until Christmas 2005. Do. Have work and
play become the same thing?
Dec: we always say, ‘we’re having three months off.’ And
then you have week’s holiday, and end up ringing each other. You’re
like, ‘I’ve had this idea for an item, wanna come over?’
Ant: Aye, I get really fidgety like. But then when I work
I like finishing early so I can got to the pub
Dec: I think, right I’ll have a lie in the day and watch
telly. Then I think, It’s a waste of a day, this! I’m
not staying in bed! This is a waste of a day!
So you can’t relax. You’re always moving onto the
next thing
Dec: Aye. What does that say about you as a person, Ant? There’s
probably a deep-rooted psychological problem there…
Ant: Aye. It says that you’re a fidgety bastard.
Did ITV hand you a check for £3 million made payable to ‘Ant & Dec’?
Ant: They give us it in a wheelbarrow.
Have you got a joint bank account?
Dec: We have! AND we’ve got interconnecting doors between
our houses. That was a rumour for a while
Where you surprised Tuffers won I’m A Celebrity?
Dec: Nah. The minute he went on I thought he was going to win
it. I thought Fash might come through in the inside, though.
Did you play football with Fash?
Ant: He can’t, can he? He claims disability.
Dec: Gets caught kicking a ball, zip, that’s the end of
his money.
Ant: We played football with the Aussies on the beach and won.
Mind you, they played a really weird 1-3-15 formation.
Dec: We played football against The Coral at Anfield last year.
Lovely fellers, but they were really shit
How have you managed to not crack up, disappear or end up presenting
Blue Peter in 15 years?
Ant: five years of that was Byker Grove, then we did the music
for four, started doing To Of The Pops, moved into kids’ telly,
and then SM:TV. We’ve been dipped in slowly.
Can you understand your appeal to people?
Dec: I think we’re quite normal? We enjoy ourselves on TV
and people enjoy seeing people having a good time. I don’t
analyse it much.
Describe the worst thing about being Britain’s most normal
celebrities?
Ant: People think we’re approachable, so you get people
selling you ideas or sitting with you in the pub all night. I’m
not very good at telling people to go away. All my mates are telling
me to tell them to piss off. But I can’t! I’m not very
good at being rude.
Dec: you’re not very good at being rude? You are to me…
Pop Idol has destroyed pop music forever. It’s your fault.
Discuss:
Dec: I know what you mean. I think it creates a problem, because
kids see normal people being famous and it looks great, and it’s
not. Kids now just want to be famous. Famous at what though?
Dec: We’ve done a couple of weeks of auditions on the second
series. What can you say to some of the people? We can’t
say we thought you were fantastic, because we thought you were
shit as well!
‘Let’s Get ready To Rumble’ was a visionary
record: as white rappers you prefigured Eminem by almost a decade.
Dec: We only did it because we couldn’t sing very well.
We didn’t even write it – the guy who wrote it, Nicky
Graham, wrote ‘When Will I Be Famous for Bros’. Fact!
Complete these lyrics: ‘We’ve got so many lyrics/we
keep them in stores…”
Dec: ‘We even got them coming out of our pores/your father,
your sister your brother, your mother/everyone’s gotta be
an AKA lover.’
What’s an AKA lover?
Dec: at the time we were called PJ & Duncan AKA. Very clever.
We knew we weren’t going to mature into fantastic talented
songwriters or whatever. We’re not. So we left it at that.
What’s the silliest amount of money you’ve ever blown
on something?
Dec: £45,000 on a BMW X5
Ant: £1,500 on a Rolex. I mulled it over for about three
months to justify it to myself. My girlfriend said, ‘just
get it! Stop moaning about it, you can afford it.’ I was
frog-marched there. ‘I’ll have that please – I’ve
been told I have to’.
What’s the best rumour you’ve heard about yourselves
recently?
Dec: That I’ve got a glass eye, probably.
Ant: And my wooden leg…
Have you any desire to be taken seriously whatsoever?
Dec: None.
Ant: I would love to get back to acting, though. My favourite
part ever was playing a drunk on top of the number 12 bus in school.
I was 11. That’s how I got the part in Byker Grove.
Where do you buy your Saturday night Takeaways from?
Ant: (instantly): Domino’s or Pizza hut, Meat Feast Pizza,
or a Mighty Meaty
Do they know you?
Ant: they do now
Do you get a discount?
Ant: I get free barbecue sauce from the Domino’s man. He
give me about five packets of warm barbecue sauce straight from
his pockets
What’s the best thing about famous and alive?
Ant: free barbecue sauce!
© Kevin Braddock 2003
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