Ant and Dec: The Wildebeest Years (aka Give Us The Aspiration We Can Cause A Sensation)

People are finding odd ways of coping with our changed circumstances, and with the pressure of being trapped indoors as Mother Nature taunts us by putting on a glorious vernal equinox outside. Myself, I've been warding off the self-isolation blues with repeated escapes into a forgotten pop album called Psyche, released in 1994 by two then up-and-coming Newcastle lads named PJ and Duncan (although not really). A week or so ago, out of nothing more than utter boredom, I dug the album from hiding and am currently hooked on it. PJ and Duncan were, of course, the aliases of Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, with whom modern audiences are more familiar as Ant and Dec, and were derived from the characters they played in the BBC children's drama series Byker Grove, where they'd spent the first half of the 1990s launching their career. One Byker Grove storyline involved PJ and Duncan recording their own dance track, "Rip It Up (Tonight I'm Free)", which some bright spark had the idea of releasing for real (as "Tonight I'm Free"), and before we knew it, there was an entire album to accompany it. Psyche was one of the very first albums I owned as a child; I listened to it on an endless loop back then too, and I can attribute my recent re-infatuation to the fact that it takes me back to a simpler, sunnier time. At that time, I favoured "Why Me?", a lugubrious ode to teenage angst, which I elected to adopt as a personal anthem, although with hindsight some of its sentiments perhaps haven't aged so well (there's a verse in there where Ant and Dec pout about being friendzoned). Nowadays my track of choice, and social distancing theme song, is the greatly more buoyant "If I Give You My Number", which is disarming as 90s bubblegum comes. I really am all over this right now.

I think it's fair to say that Ant and Dec had a kind of brand schizophrenia (if you'll excuse the expression) going on in the mid-90s, in that they were trying to develop their music and television careers concurrently, and their two public images didn't always gel. On the one hand, you had the pretty pop pin-ups, purveyors of cheesy Eurodance and soppy radio ballads, and on the other side were the cheeky wind-up merchants, known for their anarchic pranks and general naughtiness. The PJ and Duncan brand name may have initially helped to reinforce the distinction, but it was frankly always an awkward hang-on - in the early days it made sense for them to capitalise on the popularity of their Byker Grove characters (to begin with, it was all anybody knew them for), but it's not as though they were basing their music career on the premise that they were performing in-character (even in an alternate universe where PJ and Duncan became pop sensations and that unfortunate paint-balling accident never occurred). In their lyrics, they always identified as Ant and Dec. ("I'm Ant/I'm Declan/A duo/A twosome/so many lyrics, we're frightened to use 'em.") The stage name was formally ditched in 1996, and the duo attempted, briefly, to continue their music career under the banner of Ant and Dec - in part, because they were now far removed enough from their Byker Grove days for the name to be only a confusing obstruction, but also because, after their second album Top Katz bombed in the charts, it made sense for them to drop the PJ and Duncan association as quickly as possible. Ant and Dec released one more album, The Cult of Ant and Dec, in May 1997, but it was clear that their days of chart success were firmly behind them. Cult saw them strive for a more mature sound, which impressed some critics, but I don't think anyone ever went to Ant and Dec expecting maturity. They had their musical moment with Psyche - it wasn't built for longevity, but what a moment it was. Listening to Psyche as many times as I've already done in quarantine, I'd hardly describe the album as high art - it's of its time, there is a lot of filler on there, and that tracks that don't constitute filler are pure 100% plastic cheese. But it's cheese with character. In other words, a joy.

It was on the chattering cyclops that the duo seemed to be showing more promise. Ant and Dec received their own CBBC sketch show, The Ant and Dec Show, in 1995, of which I was an avid viewer. It had a freshness, irreverence and energy that scratched my itch for quirky mayhem in a way that no other children's series seemed to be doing at the time. Integral to the show's success was Ant and Dec's strongly self-deprecating sense of humour; they might have been merciless with their special guests, but they were every bit as willing to be the butt of the joke and weren't averse to poking fun at themselves. The second series, which aired across the spring of 1996, was to similarly prove a hit with young viewers. Parents, however, were less than thrilled, and Ant and Dec soon became public enemy number one among media watchdog groups. One of the key items of controversy was a game show segment called "Beat The Barber", in which young contestants had to answer a series of hair-related questions; the penalty for answering incorrectly was to have their heads shaved by the fiendish Stan The Barber. (This replaced the previous series' "Ring of Truth" segment, in which the studio audience had to vote on the validity of various statements concerning guest celebrities, and where the penalty was a more conventional gunging). Parents loathed it, much as they loathed the boys' language (the word "snog" was used with reckless abandon), innuendo and all-round irreverence. By the middle of the series, the show had amassed so many complaints that the BBC ordered the remaining episodes to be edited, much to Ant and Dec's chagrin (although the "Beat The Barber" segments were allowed to stay). Despite the controversy, the BBC were supposedly interested renewing the show for a third series, but Ant and Dec, stung by the criticisms, and the BBC's response, elected to jump ship and set up home on the edgier, trendier platform of Channel 4, who offered them a later time slot and more creative control. In February 1997 Ant and Dec Unzipped was unleashed and confused the heck out of everyone who saw it. It was not picked up for an additional series, and that's where this particular chapter of Ant and Dec's career folded.

Unzipped was kind of an awkward experience for me. It ran for ten episodes and I watched every single one of them dutifully, but I wouldn't say that it was because I liked it particularly much. I think I stuck it out purely out of brand loyalty, but I quickly twigged that, although the DNA of the CBBC series was still plainly visible, this wasn't its second coming. Unzipped debuted shortly before my 12th birthday - the world was changing, I was changing, and this was an early, uneasy taster of the ways in which things were never going to be the same. As Thomas Wolfe said, you can't go home again. But there are always memories - and, if you're lucky, you may even get to revisit them on YouTube.

Over the years, uploads of the CBBC series to YouTube have not been forthcoming - for a while, we had one full episode from the 1995 series, and the occasional clip here and there, but that was it - although recently a YouTube user called RChappo2002 uploaded a few more, and about half of the episodes of that controversial second series are currently available for your streaming pleasure. I am extremely grateful to RChappo for sharing them, as I have been wanting to revisit the series for years, and I'd given all hope for a DVD release well over a decade ago (there was a tie-in VHS release, but it was more a supplementary making-of, with much of its focus being on "Retrocops", which was always my least favourite recurring feature). Sadly, we are still missing the episode containing the absolute high point of the series, where Ant and Dec perform a conspicuously lip-synced ode to contemporary Blue Peter presenter Katy Hill (although that sequence, happily, is on the VHS). The boys' ongoing infatuation with Hill, and her increasing irritation with them, was a running gag throughout the series. Another notable running gag involved the duo's enmity with Peter Simon, presenter of contemporary CBBC game show Run The Risk, who in the first series came to blows with Ant and Dec over their repeated degradation of him in the recurring segment "Hollywood Hospital", leading to a dramatic showdown in the final episode. Then, in the second series opener, they thwarted his nefarious scheme to snatch their time slot for himself. After that, he was largely deposed as a threat, but continued to hang around their set as a kind of snivelling groupie who clearly adored Ant and Dec but was not above playing dirty in order to get their attention. Ant and Dec regarded him with nothing less than utter contempt, and would subject him to a barrage of humiliating punishments. He got his revenge in the series finale, when he convinced Lionel Blair that his life story was worthier West End musical material than either of the duo's. Simon made a cameo appearance at the start of the first episode of Ant and Dec Unzipped, as a continuity nod to the CBBC series, but his association with the duo ended there.

We are currently unable to revisit the series opener, which attracted more than fifty complaints, although we do have the second episode from 11th April 1996, which, as per a quote by Dec in Virginia Blackburn's 2005 biography on the duo, received over a hundred. How subversive is it? Dec calls Peter Simon a "git", Simon screams about being grabbed by the nipples, there are multiple uses of the S word ("snog", or "tongue sarnie", as Dec volunteers), Ant reads out a letter from a fan requesting to call him Barry and rub jam into his nipples, Ant dupes Dec with the false promise of there being a couple of scantily-clad lasses in his bedroom waiting to meet him, and Ant and Dec sing a rendition of "Something Stupid", in which Dec goes and spoils it all by asking his mortified date, "Do you still laugh at the bubbles when you pump in the bath?" Also, Robert from Newcastle doesn't Beat The Barber and has his hair taken by Stan, but gets the consolation prize of a Nintendo Game Boy. It's all very cheeky, but hardly the stuff of 100+ complaints. Overall, though, I was extremely heartened at how well the series stood up to my childhood memories; again, I wouldn't call any of it high art, but that irreverence and energy I cited earlier is still very evident, and there's a certain waggish charm to the whole thing. There's a sequence in particular in which Ant and Dec reveal the "truth" behind the historic collapse of the Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough in 1993, and...well, it's stupid as sin, but it got more than its share of giggles out of me.

The big question, though, was whether I was going to go far enough in this nostalgia trip to revisit Unzipped after all these years. My memories for that series weren't nearly so loving, but being in quarantine has suddenly given me a whole lot more time to fill, and my curiosity was at least a little piqued. At the time of writing, there are eight out of ten episodes of Unzipped up on YouTube (the sound quality's not great on any of them, but if you turn your volume all the way up, you'll get most of it). I headed into Unzipped with the assumption that, since I'm now an adult, I was sure to actually get a lot of the stuff that confused and unsettled the hell out of me as a preteen. I was only partially right. I get the prison rape jokes that went over my head back then, but they still unsettle the hell out of me. And I still find the whole thing every bit as baffling as I did age 12.

Unzipped establishes itself as a sort of sequel to the CBBC series, and finds rather an odd means of seguing between the two incarnations. The premise behind the duo's relocation to Channel 4 involved Ant being sent up the river for obscenities caused on the BBC and Dec (who had avoided the same fate only by snitching on Ant) signing a deal in his absence. Okay? It acknowledged and lampooned the controversies their previous series had generated with the self-deprecation that Ant and Dec were known for, only with a much more sour tone this time around. The implied consequences, though blatantly ridiculous, were so much nastier, and Dec's betrayal of Ant, however fictitious, seemed immediately jarring. The waggish, laddish charm of the CBBC series had largely dissipated, and without it the non-stop sparring between Ant and Dec, which had worked so well in the previous show, seemed less fun and more mean-spirited in tone. Something about Unzipped in general just feels very, very off - looking at the series now, you can see the potential for humour, but it rarely comes together as it should. In Blackburn's biography, producer Conor McAnally states that Unzipped was "a lot of fun and in some ways was a bit before its time," but acknowledges that, "it confused audiences and did not get the numbers it needed to guarantee another series." By "before his time" I assume he's referring to just how fearlessly, balls to the walls nonsensical a lot of it was (see below). There are other respects, though, where Unzipped was very much of its time. In the first episode there are a number of jokes about how much more liberal Channel 4 was compared to the BBC, including gags about gays and feminists that probably seem quite regressive by current standards (not that the CBBC series was completely devoid of homophobic jokes - there is one episode in the first series where Ant warns guest star Jaason Simmons that he would get a punch in nose in Newcastle for offering to give Dec the kiss of life - somewhat ironically, since Byker Grove had broken serious ground the year before by incorporating an explicitly gay storyline). Mind you, another episode, conversely, implied that Ant and Dec were a married couple, albeit one where the romance was blatantly long gone - if we were ever supposed to read that subtext into their dynamic, then neat.

Like the CBBC series, each episode of Unzipped had an overarching narrative with several smaller sketches interspersed throughout. Most of them I still can't make sense of, even with all the wisdom I've accumulated in the intervening years:

 
• Cockney Sparrow: Ant and Dec loved a good non-sequitur (and a bad non-sequitur alike), and this may have been the most non-sequitury of them all - a talking sparrow (actually a poorly-constructed paper cut-out) who'd randomly appear to speak snippets of Cockney dialect...and that was it. If there's a deeper gag then I don't get it. Does the term "Cockney Sparrow" mean anything that's lost on me? I've done some preliminary research, but already I can feel myself slipping down a very bewildering rabbit's hole.
• Boom Boom: A bespectacled lady jumps up and yells "Boom! Boom!" (kind of like Basil Brush, I suppose) when a particularly corny or obvious joke is uttered (although I'm not sure what the yardstick is on this show). Again, I'm confused. Am I supposed to recognise this woman? Is there any deeper significance to her cry of "Boom! Boom!"? Or is this just something strange that happens for the sake of it? I suspect that that's going to be my go-to answer for so many of these.
• Mr Swaps: One of the most baffling recurring features of all Unzipped, Mr Swaps was a character portrayed by Dec who collected all manner of bizarre and banal items. Each episode featured a segment in which he'd barter with a different character played by Ant for some elusive collectible. Watching the Mr Swaps bits now, I find myself really scratching my head as to what the joke is supposed to be - aside from one sketch, where he slips a clean-cut looking newsagent a dirty magazine, most of them seem to lack an actual punchline. Mr Swaps, more so than anything else on Unzipped, feels like a remnant of the series' origins as a children's sketch show; it probably would have worked a lot better there, where the sheer eccentricity of the character may have been enough to carry it. Here, it's just discombobulating fluff.
• Dad Gags: I incorrectly remembered this as being part of the CBBC series. As it happens, I think this fits in far better with Unzipped, in that something about it isn't quite clicking. A member of the studio audience had brought their dad along, and he would demonstrate his personal technique for attempting to impress the mates of the fruit of his loins; the rest of the audience would finish by chanting, "We think your dad is sad!" I imagine this was funner for the participants than for those watching at home. At least the theme song was catchy.
• Peter Simon may not have stuck around, but the boys had a new recurring nemesis in the form of Bryan Lying, a Paparazzi reporter who only spoke only in tabloid headlines and was constantly hanging around their set in pursuit of his latest scoop. One episode opens with Dec attempting to set him up on a date with a Princess Diana look-alike. Ouch. I don't know if the series was ever repeated, but I can guarantee that would have been cut from all future presentations.
• Geordie Gordon: Space Blerk: All three series had a recurring segment that affectionately parodied the conventions of another TV show. In the first series we had "Hollywood Hospital", a pastiche of American daytime soaps, in the second there was "Retrocops", which spoofed 1970s cop dramas, and in Unzipped we had "Geordie Gordon", a take on Flash Gordon with a distinctly Newcastle upon Tyne twist. These were invariably my least favourite segments of every series, in part because as a kid I was too young and inexperienced to get what they were spoofing. Now, I get it, and I'm a bit warmer toward "Hollywood Hospital", but "Retrocops" still largely refuses to grow on me and with "Geordie Gordon" I'm constantly itching to start scrolling my video progress bar.
• Dec The Tec: A parody of hard-boiled private eye film noirs, in which Dec, now an American private deTective, would monologue about his latest dealings. One of the better recurring features on Unzipped, provided you could tolerate Dec's wandering US accent.
• Where On Earth Is Walter?: A parody of Where's Wally/Waldo (although the title is also a nod to Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiago?), the joke being that Walter is always ludicrously easy to spot. This is a gag that lands, and one that I actually would have gotten at age 12, but there was probably only so far they could have gone with it.
• Sponsored by...: Channel 4, unlike the BBC, has ad breaks. The first half of each episode would end with the announcer laying on some overly-dramatic cliffhanger, and more non-sequiturs ("WILL Ant be doomed to life with a gold-digging hussy?" "WILdebeest?!") and the second half of each episode began with an announcement for some fictitious product that was supposedly sponsoring the series. They were all ridiculous products; there's not much else to say about them.

It seems strange to contemplate now, but back in 1997, the dual failures of Unzipped and The Cult of Ant and Dec could have killed both strands of the duo's careers then and there. And while their music career was officially dead in the water, their television career rebounded with a vengeance the following year when they were signed on to present SM:tv LIVE, ITV's new Saturday morning block. With that in mind, it's probably a good thing that Unzipped received such a harsh drubbing, because if it had succeeded then the duo might not have done SM:tv, and our cultural history would have been completely different. Can you imagine a world in which "Wonkey Donkey" never existed, and we were denied the weekly pleasure of seeing Dec absolutely lose his shit with kids who, in their sheer desperation, blurted out answers that freely ignored the requisite they had to rhyme? It would have been a sadder world indeed.

And so it was that Ant and Dec proved to be a defining force throughout my latter half of the 1990s. Since their departure from SM:tv in 2001 they've gone on to become major household names, but that's where my longstanding brand loyalty finally faded. Once they got onto that whole Pop Idol-I'm a Celebrity train, I was out. I did give Saturday Night Takeaway a go, but it definitely wasn't my thing. To reiterate Thomas Wolfe, you can't go home again. Psyche, though, was always there for me, and it's being lying in wait this entire time, for when I needed it the most. I intermittently think that I can get through all of this, with "Let's Get Ready To Rhumble" at my disposal.