You roll out of bed maybe 9.23am, according to your Baby G. Grab your Purple Ronnie dressing gown and Cartman slippers, check the Tamagotchi’s still kicking and scoot down to the kitchen. You put a Pop-Tart in the toaster, grab a glass of Sunny D and flick the telly on.
If it’s 1998, chances are you’re still loyal to Saturday morning children’s television stalwart Live & Kicking on BBC One. But Mr Blobby is getting boring, and Jamie Theakston and Zoe Ball are leaving, so you switch over to ITV to check out their new breakfast offering, SM:TV, with live music show CD:UK straight after. After a few minutes, you look up from painting your nails with Spectacular Oyster Shell or sorting out your Pog collection. This. Is. Hilarious. The rest is history: Saturday mornings are sorted for the foreseeable future.
SM:TV first aired on 29 August 1998 – just over 25 years ago. Most kids who tuned in knew Ant and Dec already, as PJ & Duncan of Byker Grove and for the duo’s hit single “Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble”. The third presenter was a young Cat Deeley, announced this week as a temporary (though rumoured to be permanent) replacement for Holly Willoughby on This Morning but who back in 1998, before landing her first major presenting job with SM:TV, had only worked on MTV’s Hitlist UK.
Quickly, the series became successful, winning ratings wars against rival Live & Kicking, scooping awards, securing the plum morning slot for over five years and kicking off long, successful careers for Ant, Dec and Deeley. The trio had a strong and dynamic chemistry and bounced off each other perfectly. It’s no wonder the presenters who came later – Finn from Hollyoaks! H Watkins! Brian Dowling! – didn’t quite work. They had a lot to live up to.
Historically, the essence of late 20th-century Saturday mornings kids’ shows was silly, wry, joyful fun. From asking viewers to send in the biggest crisps they could find to gunging celebrities, the slot never took itself too seriously. Humour and mischief was a characteristic of wider pop music coverage in the Nineties and early Noughties, in Smash Hits magazine, The O-Zone and later in Popworld – particularly the irreverent interviews of Simon Amstell – and Peter Robinson’s Versus column in NME. SM:TV fitted into this vibe: the presenters took the piss out of pop stars, and each other, and it revelled in a sense of play and fun. It was irreverent and light-hearted with non-sequiturs thrown into interviews and dash of the absurd. This was probably because it was the last time the media controlled how an artist was exposed to the wider world, and could call the shots. There was no place for anything worthy or ponderous; no issues, just laughs.
The series reflected trends in the wider pop world, from Britney and Eminem’s schlocky comedy to the over-the-top bombast of early-Noughties pop, with fake teeth, masks, wigs, an element of dress-up, which crossed over between music and television. This shared vibe allowed the programming to seamlessly merge cartoons, such as Cow & Chicken and Pokémon – the first airing of the series in the UK – with interviews with celebrities like Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Victoria Beckham and Jay Kay from Jamiroquai.
The meat of SM:TV was a run of regular features, games and skits. Wonky Donkey was a poetry game where a caller had to rhyme a soft toy animal – often in a mood – with a characteristic. Smitten Kitten, for example, or Zitty Kitty. Rarely did the young callers get that the answer had to rhyme, which would wind Dec up into an apocalyptic rage, until he was shouting at the kids. (”HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO SAY NO FOR GLEE... BEE?!!? WHO’S THAT IN THE BACKGROUND? YOUR MAM’S RUBBISH AS WELL! THAT DOESN’T RHYME YOU STUPID! LITTLE! IDIOT!) My Beautiful Corrs saw Ant, Dec and Cat dress up like the Corrs, with a joke at Jim Corr’s expense, sitting on the side with a paper bag over his head.
Watching old footage today shows just how much has changed in the music industry. As most, if not all, artists now speak direct to fans, and the media – both written and filmed – are much less crucial to record labels for publicity, you’d never got a band with the equivalent fame and success of Atomic Kitten, say, on the Pick Your Knows segment, where a child would come into the studio and choose a celebrity to answer the question. If the celebrity got it wrong, the child won, and vice versa. This type of show just doesn’t exist today. Reality television series, such as Love & Hip Hop, are the closest. But now Cardi B, for example, who starred on the show, makes her own videos to show her personality, and she tweets them direct to fans.
Towards the end of the Noughties, pop grew up. It became more serious and earnest and less funny. You wouldn’t catch pop celebs talking about issues back in the day, which is not necessarily a good thing, but it made for more light-hearted banter.
For me, CD:UK was the best part (and it meant you could have more of a lie-in). If you’d been (allowed) out the night before, you’d missed your Top of the Pops fix – nope, there was no iPlayer back then, young ‘uns – and CD:UK’s live music format offered that fix. It also, because it was live, had a sense of excitement and danger. Pink flashed a T-shirt that said “F***” after being told to remove swear words from her “Like A Pill” performance. Slash got away with talking about receiving oral sex in a bar and how his pet iguana bit the “f***” out of him. Oo-er.
You know how all the wellness gurus say a routine is good for you? I reckon the consistency of watching SM:TV and CD:UK for hours every Saturday during my early teenage years was no bad thing at all. The expectation of Challenge Ant. The warm repetition of Fartbeat. The simple, joyful lolz. Happy anniversary SM:TV and long live Wonky Donky.
