Ooh! What a Lovely Pair Our Story (23 page)

Me and Si finished our meal, then we went back to the flat to find Dec’s keys still in the door and Dec poleaxed, fast asleep on the sofa. I think it would be fair to say that, other than these basic facts, neither of us have the most crystal-clear memory of what happened that evening.

To be honest, I could have killed a man that night and I wouldn’t have remembered it. Don’t worry, I didn’t, but I could have. I wasn’t very proud of my actions though, and tried to put the whole incident behind me.

In that interview with Cat, after a few pleasantries, she said, ‘I think we’ve met before. I was in a Chinese restaurant a few months ago in Fulham with my boyfriend – he’s French – and you two were sat next to us. You were quite rude actually.’

I went bright red. I apologized at least
ten
times, and I was mortified – here was a girl we might be working with, and I’d been rude, offensive and obnoxious to her. I usually waited at least a month before I let work colleagues see my real personality. Cat finally put me out of my misery. It hadn’t been her at all; when she knew she was coming to meet us, she’d found out that Si Hargreaves was our press officer and called him up to get some dirt on us.

After being tricked, embarrassed and humiliated by this girl in the space of five minutes, there was only one option – we gave her the job. We had other girls to see, but we didn’t bother. Cat was perfect, and we knew straight away we had a lot in common – a love of mischief, a good sense of humour and, of course, a first name with three letters in it.

For us, one of the great things about working with Cat was that the three of us clicked really early on – and, by ‘clicked’, I mean, went out drinking a lot. She knew me and Ant had been together for years – not like that, you know what I mean – but that was never threatening to her. Even though she’s very pretty – and, goodness knows, with us two on screen, we needed some glamour on the show – she was always prepared to muck in and make a fool of herself. She was never precious about how she looked, or how she behaved, she was up for a laugh right from the off, and that was vital when you were doing a Saturday-morning kids’ show.

At first, it was only me and Dec who did sketches, but after a while we started to involve Cat in them. So, for instance, she became Jam Woman, a superhero who provided jam at the drop of a hat. She’d never done ‘comedy’ before, but we told her to just really throw herself into everything, and she went for it. Soon, she was putting in goofy teeth, wearing a dodgy wig and calling herself Cat the Dog.

There’s no one in the world I would rather have worked with week in, week out on
sm:tv.
Well, maybe Alan Shearer, but he would never have fitted into those little dresses. Since
Byker Grove,
Cat’s still pretty much the only person we’ve ever worked with regularly and, once the show found its feet, every week felt like the three of us were having a laugh for a living.

So, with a new team behind the camera, a fantastic co-host and a set designed by Jamie Hewlett of Gorillaz fame, we were ready to launch the show. We had a cast-iron commitment from ITV to run the show for a full year, and on 29 August 1998,
sm:tv
and
cd:uk
hit the airwaves. It was make-or-break time, and we knew it. With presenters who were new to the time slot, a brand-new show and a channel that hadn’t traditionally done well on Saturday mornings, the whole thing could easily have been a complete disaster.

And it was.

In the run-up to the first show, Ant and me were feeling very apprehensive, and Cat also seemed quite overwhelmed by the whole thing. She came in to the studio for the first time the week before and couldn’t believe how big it was – before that, she’d been working in a much smaller studio at MTV. She said, ‘Will everyone in the country be able to see this show?’ Of course they will, we told her – it’s on ITV, it’s going to be live to the whole of Great Britain. Cat nodded. ‘So my nan’ll be able to watch it in Birmingham, then?’ she asked.

None of us got much sleep the night before that first show, and our breakfast had gone untouched: there was no room in our stomachs for food, they
were all too full of butterflies. We’d done a runthrough the week before, so we knew the script but, about halfway through it, I had a moment of clarity. I thought, ‘There’s nothing in this show.’ It had no real content, and that’s never a good sign with a telly programme. You don’t often hear people saying, ‘Did you see that new show last night? There was nothing in it – it was brilliant.’

In those early episodes, we’d present the show on top of a little platform called Mission Control. It had buttons and handles, and it was supposed to be the epicentre of that morning’s entertainment – we’d play all the cartoons from there, cue the pop videos and fade in and out of breaks; it was kind of a mixture between a TV studio and a radio station. The idea was that we were fully in control. The reality was that we weren’t. None of the buttons or handles were connected to anything and we just pretended.

I actually think it was quite a good idea, Mission Control. It was SkyPlus ahead of its time, but it was just too complicated for 9.25 on a Saturday morning, when kids just want to watch cartoons and be left alone. If you see any of the early shows, you’ll notice that even we didn’t believe in it. Eventually, and it took us a while, we worked out that there’s a reason Saturday-morning kids’ shows have certain conventions – like a sofa. And no Mission Control. Those things work, but we just hadn’t realized it yet.

After the first show came off air, I just had this overwhelming feeling of, ‘Well, we got through it,’ but nothing more than that. There was no feeling of achievement or success, just relief and a slight whiff of ‘Mission Control’s a bit rubbish, isn’t it?’ I spoke to Sarha on the phone afterwards, and she’s always been very honest with me about the stuff I do. She would have been about twenty then – a bit older than our target audience, but still young enough to appreciate what we were doing. I asked her what she thought of the show, and she said, ‘I didn’t really get it.’ I reckon that’s just about the worst thing you can say about a TV show, other than, ‘And, later, PJ and Duncan are performing live.’

In the vicious, no-holds-barred battleground of Saturday-morning kids’ TV, we were slayed – and the people doing the slaying were the hosts of
BBC1’s
Live & Kicking,
Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston. Back then, the BBC on Saturday mornings was like Godzilla – a ruthless beast that crushed anything that got in its way. Looking back at the early days of our show, we were trying to be too clever and too cool for our own good which, of course, in the eyes of the kids, made us not very cool and not very clever. We’d spend the whole two hours of
sm:tv
building up to
cd:uk
and showing ‘exciting’ things that were coming up later on in our super-cool music show. What that essentially involved was filming pop stars getting in and out of their cars when they arrived at the studio. We may as well have called the show ‘Celebrity Taxi Rank’.

One of the many things we hadn’t realized was how much the audience changes through the course of a morning. At 9.30, when your viewers are all young kids, you’ve got to show cartoons, do big, daft things and make a fool of yourself – but we were making fools of ourselves in completely the wrong way: by not understanding our audience.

Throughout the autumn of 1998, the BBC trounced us in the ratings. It was really difficult coming to work and hearing, week after week, that we were coming second in a race with only two runners. I don’t mind telling you, I started thinking shelf-stacking might be back on the agenda. The BBC had traditionally dominated Saturday morning television and, with us at the helm, it didn’t look like that was going to change any time soon. There was a very real danger that, if the ratings and the show didn’t get better, then ITV would cut its losses and cancel the series. It was also our company making the show, so we were failing in the boardroom as well as on the telly. If Alan Sugar had been in that boardroom, we would have been fired pretty sharpish. Thankfully for us, he was far too busy running a successful business empire to get involved with Saturday-morning telly.

There was one thing and one thing only that saved us from getting cancelled in the first six months. That thing had a beard and a huge dollop of blind faith, and was called Nigel Pickard. Nigel was tremendously supportive of the show. He must have been under pressure from his bosses to
cancel us, and it would have been very easy for him to buckle, but he stuck to his guns.

Years later, Nigel became Director of Programmes at ITV, which meant he was in charge of
Saturday Night Takeaway
and
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me out of Here!,
and we had a great relationship with him then as well. To put all of that another way: thanks Nigel, we owe you big time.

Christmas approached fast, and the show was still dying on its arse. Then something happened that changed everything. We didn’t hire new people, we didn’t change our style, we did something which, although we didn’t know it at the time, would have an enormous impact on the show.

We did pantomime.

Earlier in the year, when we’d been in that showbiz wilderness, we’d signed up to appear in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
at the Sunder-land Empire – I’ll leave you to make your own jokes about which dwarves we were. Our co-star, playing the part of Snow White, was a beautiful, talented and charismatic actress who had a complete and utter loser of a boyfriend. Her name was Clare Buckfield.

Very funny.

Thanks, Grumpy – or were you Dopey? I can never remember…

That’s enough now.

Oh no it isn’t.

Don’t start all that again.

When we’d agreed to do the panto, we didn’t know that, by the time it came around, we’d be hosting our very own unsuccessful Saturday-morning show, but we were professionals, we’d made a commitment and we were
determined to honour it. Plus, we thought
sm:tv
could get cancelled any day so, for all we knew, this could be our last paid work for a while.

Doing
Snow White
and
sm:tv
at the same time made for a hectic schedule. We’d do two pantos a day, Monday to Thursday, then after the Thursday evening, drive through the night from Sunderland to London and spend all day Friday rehearsing
sm:tv.
On a Saturday morning we’d do the live TV show and, the second it finished, at 12.30, we’d leave the studio on the back of a taxibike and race to Battersea heliport in South London. There, we’d get a helicopter to Gatwick, a flight from Gatwick to Newcastle, then a car from Newcastle to Sunderland. Once we were in the car, we’d get into our costumes, arrive at the theatre with seconds to spare and walk on stage three hours after we’d left London. I’m getting tired just thinking about it. Despite the chaos, we made every single one of those Saturday matinees – not that audiences ever knew we’d even been on telly that morning. Most of them were far too busy watching
Live & Kicking.

As well as us two and Clare, the panto also starred our old sparring partner from
Byker Grove
Billy Fane. He had written and directed the panto, and he was always on standby in case we didn’t make it in time – although I never quite worked out how he would have managed to portray
both
of Dame Dolly Doughnut’s nephews. Yes, that’s right, I said Dame Dolly Doughnut’s nephews – these were parts so demanding, so intensely theatrical that I can only assume Daniel Day Lewis and Anthony Hopkins were busy.

Like all pantos, this one ran through Christmas and into the New Year, which meant I spent Christmas with Clare. It was wonderful. She bought me a great present that year – a brand-new stereo, which came in various separate parts, or, as they were called back then, ‘separates’. There was a radio, a tape player, a CD player, an amp and a set of speakers. (For younger readers, stereos were complicated affairs in the days before iPods.) Anyway, Clare had ordered the stereo from a shop in the centre of Newcastle but, when it came to collecting it, she realized she couldn’t manage it on her own. She couldn’t ask me for help – it would have spoiled the surprise – and Ant was busy making sure he didn’t get roped into carrying a stereo round Newcastle.

That’s right, I was.

In the end, Clare did the sensible thing and enlisted the help of the only other people she knew were available – the dwarves from the panto. So Clare, or Snow White, as she was known to our audiences, turned up on the main shopping street in Newcastle with a band of dwarves in tow, to collect the stereo. I never did find out if they sang ‘Hi-ho’ all the way there and back, but I’d like to think they did.

Saturday mornings may not have been going well, but the pantomime was breaking box-office records. The shows were packed out, and the audiences were loving it.

At the end of every performance, we’d do the song sheet, where we’d get kids from the audience up on stage to help with a song – a cover of the Fat Les classic, ‘Vindaloo’. During the song, and for a few minutes afterwards, we’d have a chat, a laugh and a joke on stage with the kids. After a few shows of talking to different groups of kids, the penny suddenly dropped: they were our audience for Saturday mornings –and, on our TV show, we just weren’t talking to them properly. We were talking to twenty-two-year-olds with hangovers, not these kids.