TV hosts Ant and Dec are celebrating their first number-one single – with a 19-year-old song and 17 years after their chart career came to an end.
We thought, well, we could possibly dust off the old baseball caps, and give it a go, for a laugh
The duo prompted a download dash for their 1994 hit Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble after performing the track ontheir Saturday Night Takeaway show last weekend.
Their re-entry into the singles chart went straight to number one, knocking The Saturdays’ What About Us featuring Sean Paul off the top stop, said the Official Charts Company.
Presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly have vowed to donate the profits to Childline.
The pair, who met on children’s TV series Byker Grove, had a run of hits in the mid-1990s under the guise of their characters from the show, PJ and Duncan.
They achieved nine songs in the top 40, with their biggest hit, Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble, peaking at nine in 1994.
Ant told ITV1’s Daybreak programme they decided to perform the song again because they were short of an item for the show.
“We thought, well, we could possibly dust off the old baseball caps, and give it a go, for a laugh,” he said.
“The production team on Saturday Night Takeaway went mad, ‘oh yeah, we remember that song, let’s do it’.” Dec added: “We did a little bit of rehearsal on Thursday; we had four hours in our schedule to rehearse the dance.
“We spent an hour, and it all came back to us. We’ve obviously done it so many times in the past.”
In the album chart, Delta Machine by electro-pop pioneers Depeche Mode failed to dislodge Justin Timberlake's The 20/20 Experience from the top of the pile. The album is now in its second week at number one.
David Bowie’s The Next Day slipped one place to number three, while darlings of the New York Indie rock scene The Strokes entered the album chart at tenth place with Comedown Machine.
Factfile
• Anthony David McPartlin was born on November 18, 1975, and Declan Joseph Oliver Donnelly was born on September 25, 1975, in Newcastle Upon Tyne. • Dec was the youngest of seven children to Irish parents Anne and Alphonsus. Ant is the taller of the pair (at 5’8”) and he always stands on the left of the TV screen.
• The duo first rose to fame as actors on children’s TV show Byker Grove.
• Ant & Dec started out in the music world as hip-pop duo PJ & Duncan. They released two albums, Psyche and Top Katz. Pop hits such as If I Give You My Number, U Krazy Katz and Stuck on U all reached the Top 40, while Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble broke the Top 10.
• The pair’s biggest hit, however, came when they switched to performing under their real names and scored a No.3 smash with England football anthem We’re on the Ball in 2002.
• Since quitting the music scene, the duo embarked on a TV career which saw them hosting Pop Idol, SM:TV, Britain’s Got Talent, Saturday Night Takeaway and I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! among other shows.
• They also returned to acting, starring in a 2002 Tribute to the Likely Lads and the 2006 film Alien Autopsy.