Ant & Dec secretly quit BGT but ‘desperate’ Cowell coaxed duo back in showdown

Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly are as much a part of Britain’s Got Talent as the dancing dogs and Amanda Holden’s plunging dresses.

But it turns out that behind the scenes, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing with the hosts revealing they once sensationally quit over a row about editing.

Explaining how they had found the previous two series ‘tricky’, Ant said they warned execs they were planning to leave before flying to Los Angeles to have it out with the show boss himself, Simon Cowell.

Ant writes in their new book, Once Upon a Tyne: “The audition days had been long, which in itself we don’t mind, but after filming interviews and interacting with every single act, as well as making jokes, giving reactions and everything else we always do, we found that when the show went out on TV, we hardly seemed to feature in it at all.

“We began to feel we were wasting our time doing the auditions because all the work we were doing was ending up on the cutting room floor.”

The pair also had their own show, Saturday Night Takeaway to focus on, and admitted they’d been left feeling ‘sidelined’.

Dec continued: “At that stage, it felt like it may as well have been anyone hosting the show and we said when our current contract expired, we thought it was time to move on.

“This isn’t something we were in the habit of doing… I remember waking up in Birmingham on the last day of the 2012 tour, opening my curtains and thinking, ‘Well, this is the last time I’ll be doing this.'”

However, Simon got wind of their plans and asked the boys to meet him in Los Angeles to air their troubles.

As Ant says, they ‘let him have it with both barrels,’ and told him they felt their energies could be put to better use.

“He made a promise to us: that things would change and we’d never feel like that again. He desperately wanted us to stay,” Dec said.

Determined not to lose them, Simon promised things would change and convinced them to do one more series, where he proved to be true to his word.

*Once Upon A Tyne – Our Story Celebrating 30 Years Together On Telly by Ant and Dec, published by Sphere, is out now