Ant and Dec are always together on television. And in real life too.'

The Observer, May 2002

The most striking thing about Ant and Dec is not that you can't tell them apart, but that you can: apart from the light entertainment and children's shows that went before them, and apart from other people who made it famous and rich when they were young. Ant and Dec, both aged 26 (Ant is always on the left in photos), represent a new generation of TV hosts - not comedians (though occasionally they can be funny), not singers (though they used to do that all the time) and not really celebrities (slender tabloid interest, very polite when you meet them, only one uncharacteristic incident at a lap-dancing establishment) - but they can stand in front of a camera and talk to it as if it was a friend they used to know from school. To do this without artifice is a very valuable thing in television.

You can twist yourself in knots trying to explain their achievement, but all you need to understand is that they used to climb trees and weren't the sort of people who liked to watch children's television with an educational flavour. Their appeal is embedded in a little-remembered programme, their first, that went out at teatime in 1996. The Ant and Dec Show on Children's BBC featured a novel item called Beat The Barber, a quiz in which young people could win fantastic prizes such as computer consoles. Unfortunately, the child who got the least correct answers had their head shaved.

'The kids loved it,' Dec says. 'We were going to shave eyebrows instead, but nobody was sure if they'd grow back, so we did heads.' But there was outcry from middle England, and the BBC got 45 complaints. Someone said it reminded them of the concentration camps.

Before this, before they did SM:tv on ITV, before they hosted Pop Idol and the Brits, before they became the new Likely Lads and took responsibility for the dodgy official England World Cup song ('Campbell to Rio, Rio to Scholesey...'), they used to hang out at a fictional youth club in Newcastle called Byker Grove, and it is here that they met at the age of 13 and became friends. Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly both liked Newcastle United football club and the same sort of pop music, and they were soon intertwined in the televised storylines, including a love triangle in which Ant went blind after a paint-balling accident.

to read on download the Adobe PDF

Download Adobe PDF reader