Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (20 page)

‘Is this ginger?’

To which I replied, ‘Yeah, it is.’ And then left the room, so I could laugh loudly and properly.

I got it lightened slightly on the day of the shoot, but there wasn’t much you could do. I was gutted. The image change we’d been so excited about ended up with me looking like a young Mick Hucknall.

Even though our third album,
The Cult of Ant and Dec
, wasn’t released until May 1997, ‘Better Watch Out’ came out in August of 1996, and it made the top ten. Okay, it was number ten – but that’s still technically the top ten, and no one can take that away from us. I’ve got such happy memories of that summer – our music was changing and we had our sights set on the big time.

When it came to the rest of the album, we worked with a couple of writers called Biff and Matt. Music-industry professionals called them Stannard and Rowe, so they insisted we stuck with Biff and Matt. They helped us try and develop the more mature sound we were after. I know what you’re thinking, ‘What, more mature than “Our Radio Rocks”? You’d have to write an opera.’ Biff and Matt even encouraged us to write a few tracks ourselves – and some of them weren’t even Boyz II Men covers. In the past, we’d written a B-side here or a lyric there, but this time we were much more involved, and it was great fun.

We wanted to make music that was more like the stuff we were listening to, which was bands like Oasis and Blur. That’s just how ambitious, determined and downright stupid we were.

Towards the end of the year, I got the chance to make some other big changes, to correct some of the mistakes I’d made in Ant’s and my first few years as pop stars. For a start, I got the big bedroom when we moved out of our flat in Fulham and into a new one in Chelsea. Finally, I could put the coin-toss catastrophe behind me. But before we’d fully moved out of the Fulham flat, or ‘vacated the property’, the lady from the estate agents came round to check that everything was spick and span. It was neither, but there wasn’t any lasting damage and we always had the fire-hazard sofa up our sleeves if things got, well, heated.

She was going round the kitchen, checking everything still worked when she did something that shocked Ant and me to the core. There was one small door that we’d tried and failed to open when we first moved in, and she did it straight away, and said, ‘Yep, the dishwasher’s fine.’

We couldn’t believe it. We’d been there twelve months and we hadn’t known we had a dishwasher. I was devastated. Just think of the time I could’ve saved teaching Dec how to wash up.

When we moved into our new flat in Chelsea, we were still leading the
Men Behaving Badly
lifestyle. We spent a lot of time in various pubs, but one of our most popular haunts was Sainsbury’s. It was at the end of the road, so we used to go down there and stock up on essentials like bread, milk and, of course, beer. We’d fill up a trolley and wheel it back to the flat – it was quicker than driving there. Although, if Sainsbury’s lawyers are reading this, I’d like to point out that we did always return the trolleys.

After a few months, though, disaster struck: Sainsbury’s introduced a system that meant that, when you took the trolley out of the car park, the wheels locked. Presumably it was designed to stop people stealing the trolleys, although as I say, we always returned them – I don’t think we were the cause of the new system being introduced. Anyway, as you’d expect, the new trolleys deterred most people from taking them off the premises.
Most
people. But not us. It just meant we would half push, half lift our trolley down the road, the wheels scraping the pavement. Those trolleys could
have had elephants attached to them for all we cared – nothing would have stopped us getting our beer home.

In between trips to the supermarket, we were also busy trying to keep our TV career afloat. After all the furore – or the mild bit of attention – we’d got from Beat the Barber, we’d had a meeting with the BBC, and their policy was very clear: ‘We want to keep you, but you’ve got to tone it down.’ Our policy was equally clear: ‘We’re not going to tone it down, so we’re leaving you.’ We’d often thought about flirting with other channels behind their backs, but this time we went the whole hog and committed to a full-blown relationship with another broadcaster.

At the time, Channel 4 was the home of the edgiest, riskiest shows on TV –
The Word
,
TFI Friday
and
Countdown
, to name but three. In our first meeting with them, we asked Lucinda Whiteley, who was the Head of Children’s, if they’d let us shave people’s hair off. Her response? ‘You can shave their pubes for all we care!’ That was good enough for us, and we signed a deal with Channel 4. We also started our own production company, the cunningly titled Ant and Dec Productions. We were twenty-one, we had a new TV deal and we were the managing directors of our own TV company.

I hate us, don’t you?

November of that year marked my twenty-first birthday, and I had a surprise party, which was organized by my mam and Davey and held at FM’s bar in the centre of Newcastle. I was really pleased that my dad was invited, as it was the first time I’d seen him for a few years – it was a big surprise, even at a surprise party. It was a bit awkward at first, but it worked out fine. He told me that he’d sit away from everyone and keep himself to himself. He said he wasn’t there to cause a scene, just to say happy birthday and tell me he was very proud of me, which I appreciated.

In a way, that night sums up my relationship with my dad. We still talk from time to time, but he doesn’t try and force his way into my life. I know that, down the years, he’s been offered money by newspapers to talk about
me, and he could have made a tidy penny, but he’s always turned them down. He’s a plumber, and there’ve been times when he’s been out of work and the money would have come in handy, but he’s never done it – and I respect him for that. I know that, one day, we’ll probably see each other more regularly. My sister Sarha’s started seeing him since she had her son, Ethan, and I completely understand why, because whatever’s happened, Ethan is my dad’s grandson.

The highlight of the evening came about an hour into the party. An enormous – and clearly cardboard – cake was wheeled towards me, and everyone started singing. I remember thinking, ‘What
is
this? Am I the only one who’s spotted that this cake is made of cardboard?’ The singing ended, and I was getting ready to thank everyone when I noticed that something inside the cake was moving. For my twenty-first, I’d asked for a boxer, and I thought, ‘Great, they’ve got me the dog.’ The top of the cake flew off and I couldn’t believe it when Lisa, who I’d been told had had to stay back home in Oxford, jumped out. Wearing a Newcastle United shirt. It was a fantastic surprise. I was over the moon, while at the same time thinking, ‘I really wanted that dog.’

In the same month as Ant’s birthday, we released another single, ‘
When I Fall in Love
’, which hit number twelve. It seemed as though our new projects were working out very nicely, thank you. Despite our new image and our honesty in interviews, it hadn’t affected our record sales too much. We had a new series on Channel 4 about to launch, and things were looking better than they had for a long time.

We didn’t know it yet but, within twelve months, the whole thing would collapse around our ears.

Chapter 17

Tuesday 18 February 1997.

It’s a date that’s etched on quite literally no one’s brain, but that was when our new show with Channel 4,
Ant and Dec Unzipped,
first hit the front rooms of Great Britain. The show went out every Tuesday at six, but because we were so busy completely reinventing British pop music, I can hardly remember a thing about it. Still, at least that’s something we’ve got in common, eh, readers? Here’s what I can recall: Conor McAnally was back on producing duties and Dean Wilkinson was writing for us, but there was one big problem with the show: rebellion. Or a complete lack of it, to be precise.

Ripping up the rulebook was a lot easier on BBC1 at 5 p.m. than it was on Channel 4 at 6 p.m. Channel 4 probably didn’t even
have
a rule-book and, if they did, it would have been torn to pieces long before we arrived. Channel 4 was so edgy that nothing we did seemed particularly risqué. The idea for the show was that me and Dec lived together in a flat, although at least we knew where the dishwasher was in this one. We were joined by celebrity guests and, each week, we put on a different show – one week might be a costume drama, the next a whodunnit, and so on – and by ‘and so on’, I mean that’s all I can remember. In many ways, the guests we had reflected our tastes at the time – there was Neil Hannon, the lead singer from the Divine Comedy, a great songwriter and someone whose work we really admired. And then there was Jo Guest. She was a topless model – and we admired her work too.

Although we didn’t feel it was our finest hour or, to be more precise, ten half-hours, the show still won a Children’s BAFTA. Then something happened that’s very common in telly – everyone changed jobs. It’s just the way the industry works – I mean, it’s not as if people would change their whole job just to avoid working with us… is it? After ten shows of
Unzipped
, we went for a meeting at Channel 4, and it was less ‘Hi, guys, what do you want to do next?’ and more ‘Hi, guys, here’s your leaving present.’ After one series, our time at Channel 4 looked like it was coming to an end.

We decided to take solace in song, and we went back to our music career. Fortunately, Telstar were about to put out
The Cult of Ant and Dec,
from which we’d already released two singles. There was a general election called for 1 May 1997, and we held a big launch party for the album at Chelsea Town Hall on the same night. Anyone who’s anyone was there, or at least anyone who didn’t give a toss about politics – I know Sophie Dahl and a policeman definitely turned up, because I had my picture taken with them. I still can’t believe Tony Blair didn’t make it, mind, apparently he had ‘better things to do’.

All night at the party, you’d hear the same sentence: ‘Who’s going to get to Number Ten?’ I remember thinking, ‘I’m hoping for top five, to be honest.’

The album came out, and we released our third single, ‘Falling’. A tour followed, with a live band, which was a different experience for us. We could interact with them on stage; we could drink with them after the show; and the whole thing made us feel like proper musicians. Despite the fact we toured and did monstrous amounts of promotion, though,
The Cult of Ant and Dec
didn’t do well.

In hindsight, we probably confused the audience a bit. We were trying to go a bit more
Cigarettes and Alcohol
and a bit less
Teddy Bears and Chocolates,
and it just wasn’t working out. We sold around 60,000 albums, which, considering the first album had shifted over half a million, wasn’t what you’d call progress. We ended up a bit like the England football team at the previous summer’s European Championships – we came up short in the quest for success. That’s where the similarity ends, by the way: we weren’t managed by Terry Venables – he’s a great football coach, but try asking him to get you a spot on
Top of the Pops
– it’s a complete waste of time.

We decided to drown our sorrows. Our regular watering holes in Chelsea included pubs like the Man on the Moon and the Magpie and Stump, plus a sports bar called Shoeless Joe’s. I don’t know who Joe was or how he’d lost his shoes, but they had a huge screen, so we watched a lot of football there. Unfortunately, we had to stop going to Shoeless Joe’s. We watched a Newcastle game there one Sunday afternoon and, at the end of it, the owner started slagging off Newcastle United and, most heinously of all, Kevin Keegan. I took offence and started a bit of an argument with him. It ended up with me and the owner standing face to face, screaming at each other. At one point, I thought we were going to have an actual fight.

For once, this wasn’t little-man syndrome, this was protecting Kevin Keegan syndrome – something all Newcastle United fans will be very familiar with.

Ant and me did leave without any blows being traded and, in my mind, with Kevin Keegan’s honour restored. But a few days later we were in the Man in the Moon when the landlord said to us, ‘I see you’ve been barred from Shoeless Joe’s then.’ We didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He produced that night’s
Evening Standard
, and showed us an article about celebrities who’d been banned from various pubs and clubs. On that list was ‘Ant and Dec – barred from Shoeless Joe’s in Chelsea.’ We must be the only people who’ve ever been barred from a pub via a newspaper. I wouldn’t want to drink anywhere that slagged off Kevin Keegan anyway. I did miss the big screen, though.

After three albums, our three-album deal with Telstar was understandably at an end. We were starting to think it might be time to reconsider our career choices but, at the time, we had no other offers, so Dave Holly started trying to negotiate a new contract for us while we went back on the road. We had a long-standing commitment to do a tour of the Far East, a
part of the world we’d never been to before, and a place where, for some reason, we’d been selling a lot of records. It seemed like it might be the last corner of the globe where people would actually be pleased to see us, so we packed our bags and headed for Japan, aware that this might well be our last throw of the pop-music dice. We were accompanied by John Knight, who worked for Dave Holly and was in charge of our schedule – he should have been knighted for dealing with that alone – and Mike Faux, who was our tour manager, which involved doing security and keeping hold of the DATs we mimed to.