Ant McPartlin won first role by pretending to be drunk then almost quit showbiz

Ant McPartlin landed his first ever acting role long before he met his presenting partner and best pal Dec Donnelly – by pretending to be drunk.

I’m A Celebrity and Britain’s Got Talent host Ant was fresh into his time at Rutherford Comprehensive in Newcastle when his drama teacher Lynne encouraged him to audition for a part in new BBC kids’ show Why Don’t You?

While producers were visiting schools in the area looking for talented kids to sign up, Ant decided to give it a shot after some encouragement from his teacher.

Ant, now 44, has carved out a massively successful career as one half of Ant and Dec.

But on the day of this audition, back before they’d met, a young Ant was feeling nervous.

Those taking part in the audition were asked to improvise a scene about transport, and Ant stood out from the crowd by thinking outside the box.

Looking back on the moment in his and Dec’s first joint autobiography, Ooh! What a Lovely Pair, he wrote: “Reading this, you’re probably thinking, ‘Transport, eh? I wonder what the young Ant McPartlin did with that – was he the captain of a ship, perhaps? A racing driver maybe? Or even an airline pilot?

“Guess again. I was a drunk. What’s a drunk got to do with transport? You might well ask, but that was the genius of my performance: I was a drunk on a bus.”

Ant got the part and began his acting career on Why Don’t You?, spending the summer filming on board a double-decker bus – but with no need to pretend to be drunk.

Life in the limelight brought about some problems for Ant in those early days though.

On the show, Ant was often the butt of the joke and “portrayed as a bit of an idiot”, which didn’t help when he went back to school after the summer to resume his lessons.

He penned: “They’d call me a k**b, or an idiot, or say they’d ‘seen me acting like a t*t on the telly’. To be honest, it put me off the idea of performing. It’s that thing that’s happened to us all at one time or another in our schooldays: you get teased for something – it could be a stupid question you ask a teacher or a pair of trousers you’re wearing – and you grow to hate that thing, it makes you want to make sure you never do it again.

“Well, that was how I felt about performing. So I stopped going for auditions.”

Dec ended up landing the role of Duncan in Byker Grove a few years later in 1989.

After some persuasion, Ant later auditioned and joined the show as PJ one year later – and the rest is history.