Ant and Dec admit they’re missing Simon Cowell after telling of huge BGT row

Ant and Dec have admitted they’re missing Simon Cowell backstage at Britain’s Got Talent.

The Geordie duo recently revealed that they once quit the ITV show after a huge showdown with Simon.

Despite any differences they might have had over the years, it’s clear that the music mogul is a big miss.

Simon is stuck in LA and unable to travel to the UK for the show’s semi-finals after breaking his back when he fell off his electric bike.

But hosts Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly took to Instagram to show how they’re keeping him in the gang.

The lads posed up at a table adorned with snacks, their personalised water bottles and a framed photo of Simon.

Dec was seen gazing lovingly at the snap while Ant pointed at it and pulled a cheeky face.

Posting it on Instagram, they captioned the picture: “Missing you @simoncowell, but we always have you near in our backstage den @BGT tonight at 8pm”

One fan joked: “Dec seems to be missing Simon. Im not sure about Ant”

The boys recently admitted that they once quit the hit show after a row over editing.

After filming two “tricky” series, Ant said they warned bosses they were planning to leave the show before flying out to Los Angeles to have it out with Simon.

He penned in their 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 lads had been left feeling “sidelined” on the show, but at the same time, were incredibly busy with their own programme, Saturday Night Takeaway.

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’.”

After Simon found out, he got the boys to meet him in LA to talk about it.

“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.

* Britain’s Got Talent airs tonight at 8pm on ITV