3 hours ago
2
Although I loved my time at Nottingham University, I didn’t go there with much intention of doing anything with my degree in chemistry afterwards. Not only was it full-on, I wasn’t particularly good at it. In an experiment to examine the incubation of goat’s blood, I accidentally added 10 times too much hydrogen peroxide. Blood shot out of the flask and splattered all over my face like a scene from The Sopranos. I can still hear my professor’s screams.
But that’s OK, because I hadn’t really gone to university to win the Nobel prize, I’d gone to experience the culture of the mid 90s. British dance music – through acts such as Orbital, Leftfield, Underworld, Faithless and the Chemical Brothers – was exploding. Britpop was happening around me: (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory was released the week I went to uni. My entry to this smorgasbord of cool happened when, in our second year, Ant and Dec announced a live show up in town.
No longer known as their aliases PJ and Duncan from Byker Grove, the pair had started presenting CBBC’s The Ant & Dec Show, which featured “Beat The Barber”, in which they’d shave kids’ heads if they lost a multiple choice pop quiz. We assumed the live show would be comedy, and full of ironic students, maybe because around the same time we went to see Robbie Williams on his first ever solo tour – where he played Let Me Entertain You, Angels and a thrash version of Back for Good – and it was full of ironic students. However, Ant and Dec hadn’t really moved away from their pre-pubescent audience. The theatre was full of teenage girls who kept pinching us on the bottom and we were the only people at the bar because everyone else was under age.
After drinking too much beer, we managed to work out which hotel Ant and Dec were staying at and somehow charmed our way into their hotel rooms, chatting away to the pair for hours while helping ourselves to their aftershow beers.
It was in those bleary early hours that suddenly a new career path opened up. Why become a boring chemist who spent the day boiling, titrating, stirring, filtering, distilling, crystallising, diluting, synthesising and pH testing, when I could forge a career out of goofing? I now knew that I wanted to become Ant instead. And, luckily, there was a Dec to this plan – my mate Phil, who was sitting right next to me. It might sound like the kind of drunken plan that wouldn’t stand up in the light of day, but from then on we (ultimately unsuccessfully) started a double act.
We wrote together for our student magazine, Impact, under a single pen name – Phil and Rich. We bought cheap decks, gave each other DJ names (him: Flashmaster Chops; me: Flexmaster Groove) and attempted to DJ by mixing the Flash Gordon soundtrack by Queen into Children by Robert Miles, then playing Born Slippy .NUXX by Underworld on repeat. We reinvented ourselves as “comedy” radio DJs and presented Phil and Rich’s Potato Mash on University Radio Nottingham, with rubbish games such as “Feel the Food” (don’t ask) and “Name That Twang” (ditto). The highlight was when we forgot to press the “broadcast” button, and sent two hours of silence over the airwaves.
We even managed to – vaguely – keep our dreams alive after uni. We sent our radio demo tape off to everyone we could think of. The Radio 1 controller told us to “keep up the good work”, but didn’t offer us the Breakfast Show on the spot, like we’d hoped. We later lived in Australia, where we started our own website – philandrich.com – full of comedy, jokes and banter, mainly stolen from A Bit of Fry & Laurie. Then … the dream of being a joint brand fizzled out, although we’ve both managed to work in creative industries: I fell into journalism and Phil does something I don’t understand at the BBC. But there’s always a chance that Ant and Dec will take early retirement, ITV will advertise for a new double act, and we’ll be the obvious shoo-in.
