Ant and Dec are two of the UK's best-loved TV personalities, and have been friends for more than thirty years.
However, things haven't always been plain sailing for the pair. Now 46, they first rose to fame when they joined the children's television show Byker Grove, in 1989.
After four years on the show, Ant and Dec kept their character names - PJ and Duncan - as aliases and embarked on a pop career. Let's Get Ready to Rhumble, the lads' most successful hit, went to number 9 in the UK charts. A 2013 re-release saw it go straight to number one.
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Re-branding as Ant and Dec in 1994, they got their first presenting gig on a CITV Saturday morning show called Gimme 5, before landing "The Ant and Dec show" on CBBC. These shows kick-started a decades long career in TV presenting.
Since then, Ant and Dec have gone on to present huge primetime programmes such as Pop Idol, Play Your Cards Right, Saturday Night Takeaway and I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here. They have won the Best Presenter award at the NTAs 20 times in a row.
Their latest show, Limitless, has quickly become a fan favourite, but Ant and Dec haven't always been so lucky. One of their early shows, was "awful", according to them.
In 2014, Ant and Dec told the Mirror they were lucky to survive the axe following dwindling ratings for ITV programmes such as SMTV and CD:UK, which they presented alongside Cat Deeley in the 1990s. Ant said: "[SMTV] was so awful to start with and the ratings were so low we might never have made it past the first six months."
After thirty years in the limelight, the they released an autobiography entitled Once Upon a Tyne: Our Story, in 2020. Anecdotes within the book revealed they had actually come to blows before a breakfast show performance one morning.
The fight happened when they, as PJ and Duncan, were due to appear on GMTV's Fun in the Sun with Anthea Turner, in 1995. The show was to be broadcast live from Torremolinos in Spain.
In the book, Ant said: "It was a special summer holiday version of the ITV breakfast show, in 1995, we were promoting Stuck On U. Our tour manager Kim Glover told us we had the day to ourselves before appearing on GMTV the following morning... so we went to the pub."
One pint became two and more and before long they were a little worse for wear and Dec was looking to head back to bed at 10pm as they had an early start to the next day and a hangover was now a real prospect. As Dec headed to the lift, Ant recalls saying: "What the hell are you going to bed for?”
With Dec continuing his "stumbling towards the lift," Ant said that "something about that incensed me and I lost it." Trying to lay down his authority, Ant demanded: “Don’t you dare walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”
Dec said that he started ranting at Ant, asking "who the hell does he think he was, talking to me like that?" and said that at that point, Ant "was really pushing my buttons."
The pair continued arguing in the lift, with Dec ranting at his singing partner as the floors went by. When Ant then tried to get his point across, Dec put his fingers in his ears and started saying: “La la la la, I can’t hear you.”
Ant admitted: "That made my blood boil… I punched Dec in the chest." Dec said he responded by trying to knock the cap off Ant's head as the punches started to swing.
The pair proved they were no prize fighters and Dec said: "I didn’t quite hit the target and ended up just punching the peak of his cap." He went on to admit that "I proved Dec is rubbish at fighting when he’s had a few."
Just two hours later they were both in make-up at the breakfast show and maintaining their huffs as they refused to look at each other. Once under the lights of the TV show and with the cameras rolling, the pair's closeness returned and they claim they have never come to blows since, in the 25 years since that drunken moment.
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