From The Times website (I think it's going to be in The Sunday Times tomorrow)
Ant and Dec: Why turning 50 made us think again
In a rare interview, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly talk about growing up together on screen, their difficult forties — and why they’re trying something new with a podcast.
For decades now Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have been Ant and Dec, a single entity. You never see one without the other and if you did, the world would probably be ending. Like Simon without Garfunkel or beans without toast, Ant or Dec without Dec or Ant wouldn’t be right.
They met on the set of Byker Grove, the first proper television drama for teenagers, when they were 13 and, late last year, they turned 50. In the intervening 37 years, as everything else about television has changed beyond recognition, they have been a constant presence in our living rooms on Saturday nights. They don’t appear to have lost their enthusiasm. They don’t appear to have aged. They just keep going like a pair of Peter Pans on Duracell. Except the reason they are giving a rare interview is because they are trying something different. They are doing a podcast.
Big deal, you say — everybody and their dog has a podcast — but in the news of its launch we can learn not just what makes Ant and Dec tick but also quite a lot about ageing, ambition, friendship and, if I may be so bold, the meaning of life.
“Ant and Dec both have children and so they don’t hang out as much as they used to,” it says on the press release announcing the new venture. “They’re making a podcast so they can do just that.” Hanging Out … with Ant & Dec has no script — they’re just “catching up, reminiscing and [guided by listeners] seeing where the conversation takes them.”
When I ask them why a podcast and not a TV show, they talk about work/life balance and getting older and picking projects more carefully. “In the last two or three years, perhaps in anticipation of turning 50, we’ve had a reappraisal,” McPartlin says. “Yeah,” Donnelly says, “we both became fathers and we became fathers later in life.” McPartlin has a 19-month-old son and two teenage stepdaughters with his second wife, Anne-Marie Corbett, and Donnelly, who married his manager, Ali Astall, in 2015, has two children aged seven and three.
“We were having kids, and we had Saturday Night Takeaway on air, which took up most of our year,” McPartlin says. “It just became unsustainable.” Having completed the 20th series of the show, they decided that was it — keep doing I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Britain’s Got Talent but step away from the time-consuming Takeaway. A podcast, Donnelly says, will be easier — “It won’t be every day, every hour, working weekends.”
Of course, I can’t help but point out, there is an even easier way to spend time with your mate. You could just have dinner. Why do it with an audience and microphones?
“You mean, why are we inflicting it on the rest of you?” Donnelly asks. “It’s a very good question.” They both start laughing and then he repeats himself, his voice rising to a familiar high-pitched gasp. “It’s … a … very good … question.”
To understand the omnipresence of Ant and Dec, we must go back to the beginning, before they even knew each other. Donnelly was the youngest of seven — his elder brothers had a band and his parents ran the Tyneside Irish Centre. He was Irish dancing, one suspects, before he was walking. McPartlin, on the other hand, was shy. He auditioned for Byker Grove only because he enjoyed drama at school and his teacher urged him to go. “When I got asked to go back to the BBC for a second audition, I hid the letter,” he says. “I only told one friend and that friend told my mum. He grassed me up but it was the greatest grass ever.” A reluctant McPartlin landed a part in the second series and met Donnelly, one of the original cast, on set. They both remember that first meeting.
“Ant has a resting grumpy face,” Donnelly says, “and I remember seeing him on the periphery with that face.”
“Hold on,” McPartlin interrupts, “can you put an asterisk after ‘resting grumpy face’ and say that I was just really nervous?”
Over the course of that second series they went off to play their respective storylines — an addiction to fruit machines and the launch of a pirate radio station (oh, for the simpler days) — but they soon found common ground. “We both liked Newcastle United, we both loved going to the cinema, we both loved Vic and Bob,” McPartlin says. “There were just certain things culturally that we aligned on and that was it. We went to a Newcastle game.”
“That was our first date,” Donnelly says.
Our interview is taking place at a fancy agency in Chiswick. They moved to the Bugaboo belt of west London in their early twenties, first sharing a house, then a street, then, as significant others and families arrived, a postcode. They’re at home here — relaxed, disarming, quick-witted, exactly the cheeky chappies you’d expect from the screen. Immediately I want to be in their gang, which is not very Paxman of me as an interviewer.
Their success feels inevitable with hindsight, but the outlook for child actors is not always so rosy. Too much success too early, and disaster, or a more disappointingly desk-based second career, often awaits. Not so for the singular Ant and Dec. They pivoted with apparent ease from Byker Grove to Saturday night prime time via a brief but chart-topping phase as the pop-rap duo PJ and Duncan and a takeover of Saturday morning children’s television.
“It wasn’t an orthodox childhood,” Donnelly says. “Having started on Byker Grove when we were 13, we stumbled into a pop career for a few years, then stumbled into a TV career, but at the base of all of that was friendship. When you’re in the eye of the storm, some things working, some things not, you rely on each other because they are the only other person who understands what you’re going through.”
“Part of it is we were drip-fed or slowly immersed into the world of fame,” McPartlin says.
“And we were both quite ambitious,” Donnelly says. “We realised we’d love to do this long term and become more successful.”
At which point we must address the first elephant in the room — Ant and Dec have never been cool and they have never been highbrow. They don’t push the envelope and, unless it involves eating kangaroo testicles on I’m a Celebrity, they don’t do taboo. They are mainstream, they do ITV light entertainment, this isn’t Civilisation. What is surprising is that this was deliberate.
“There was a period where Saturday morning TV went a bit cool,” McPartlin says. “It had always been young kids watching but then a lot of students started watching it and we were getting profiles in magazines. There would have been a danger of us being seen as the cool TV hosts and we didn’t want to chase that.”
“We wanted to be very mainstream,” Donnelly says.
They tell me how they had grown up watching Saturday night television — Noel’s House Party, Game for a Laugh and so on — and we descend briefly into a nostalgia fest of whole families, grandparents included, gathered around the box, transfixed by Bruce Forsyth. That they wanted to continue that tradition feels like the sort of thing two ITV presenters would say, but surely, surely, two young men breaking into television would grow out of Brucie and want to try something a bit more daring?
“When we hosted CD: UK [ITV’s version of Top of the Pops in the late 1990s], you could see that the periods of being cool for bands was very short,” McPartlin says. “You were in, you were out and we could see that chasing cool was a very short-term thing … I don’t think we’ve ever been cool.”
Most people, myself included, would find the prospect of live television daunting. Having to perform in front of millions of people every Saturday is bad enough, but what if something goes wrong? What if you’re not your usual effervescent TV self? What if your arm goes numb? It must require unnatural levels of confidence and determination, but when I ask, McPartlin quotes Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live: “The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11.30.”
“The voice of doubt never leaves you and that’s what keeps you on your toes,” he continues. “There’s an adrenaline hit we get from live TV and maybe that’s what we’re chasing. It’s hard to find that elsewhere.”
For two young men coming of age and then living their lives in the limelight, there have been relatively few missteps — the odd unflattering tabloid headline and, in 2007, an unprecedented £15 million fine for ITV when it emerged that a phone-in vote on Saturday Night Takeaway had been “rigged” — but nothing came close to breaking their winning streak of 23 years as best presenter at the National Television Awards (voted for by viewers).
Then we reach the second elephant in the room. In 2018 McPartlin pleaded guilty to drink-driving after crashing into two cars in London while driving with his mother. He was given a 20-month driving ban and fined £86,000 (the district judge calculated the sum given his weekly income was about £130,000). It was the kind of incident that could end a career — or, in this case, two careers. At the time Donnelly said he wanted “to punch him and hug him at the same time” and McPartlin announced that he was taking a break from television and sought treatment for addiction. They still won the National Television Award at the end of the year.
In the years since there has been the reassessment — there has been settling down and spending more time with the families. There has been a decision to do a podcast rather than a television show. Of course, because Ant and Dec are far more calculating than their on-screen personae would suggest, the podcast is part of a strategy. They can reach people who don’t watch actual television programmes on actual televisions and then coax them subtly into their Saturday night empire. It’s the same principle as booking YouTubers to go into the jungle. But, damn it, I actually believe them when they say they’re (also) doing it for their friendship.
“Turning 50 for me was great because my early forties was a really tough time,” McPartlin says. “These last few years, it’s the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. What changes as you get older, especially being sober as well, for me, is the purpose. When you’re live on I’m a Celebrity in Australia and you’re in the moment with your best friend, there’s nowhere else I want to be, but as soon as we finish, we go back to our apartments by the beach and we’re with our families. That’s where we want to be right then.”
Like an ITV presenter searching for a heart-warming conclusion, I ask what they most admire about each other (I’ve already asked what they find most irritating and got nowhere). McPartlin says he admires Donnelly’s vocabulary, which is fine. Donnelly takes a deep breath and, voice cracking, says: “What I most admire is that with the challenges he’s faced, especially over the last few years, Ant took responsibility and real action. He worked on himself so much to get back not just to being himself but actually being a much better person than he was before.”
I told you — the meaning of life. Friendship over ambition. Life over work. And then, as we wrap up, I ruin a rare moment of fraternal love by asking if they felt any responsibility for Nigel Farage? His appearance on I’m a Celebrity in 2023 has, after all, been described as “reputational rehab”.
“How long have you got?” Dec asks, laughing.
“Absolutely not,” Ant cuts in, sensing the potential headlines.
Maybe they’ll get into it on their podcast.
Hanging Out with Ant & Dec launches on Jan 22 on Belta Box and everywhere you get podcasts.
