WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG FOR ANT?
He has built his name and fortune as one half of the beloved TV duo Ant and Dec, but this week Anthony McPartlin was at the centre of yet another scandal when he was arrested for drink driving so…
whom they co-hosted SM: TV Live. They later branched out from children’s TV with Saturday night game show Friends Like These and the 2001 talent show Pop Idol.
Meanwhile, Ant’s relationship with wife Lisa dates back to 1994 when they met at a concert and she was his rock for years until their recent split. Speaking in June, McPartlin explained how he relied on Lisa to get him to hospital when he overdosed on tramadol, morphine and alcohol while recovering from a second knee operation.
“It was five in the morning and I was screaming in pain so I rang Lisa,” he said of the incident which occurred last year. “She was upstairs because I was living in the living room because I couldn’t get around. I said, ‘You’re going to have to call an ambulance. I’m in a bad way’.”
After returning from rehab Ant was praised by many of his colleagues for his professional approach, Britain’s Got Talent judge Amanda Holden said: “It feels like nothing happened and that’s rare and it’s because of his tenacity and his sense of humour about it all. That’s the most important thing to keep when you’re in this industry. It’s hard sometimes to keep laughing.”
BGT supremo Simon Cowell also praised the way he’d dealt with going public with his addiction woes, saying: “He hasn’t changed in all the years I’ve known him. I don’t know details behind the scenes, but when someone has the courage to own it, deal with it, made a public statement, we would a million per cent support him. I think he’ll be fine. He’s got great people around him and also got a great family around him. Dec’s his best friend. We made it clear we would always stand by them.”
Despite coming back almost seamlessly for the last series of I’m A Celebrity… and more recently Saturday Night Takeaway, the latest incident would appear to show that his recovery still has some way to go. Fears have grown for him since he announced his divorce, as he had to confront his demons with wife Lisa no longer by his side.
His mother Christine, who was in the car with him when he crashed into two other vehicles on Sunday, has moved back in with him. It is her and, of course, his best man Declan Donnelly who make up the core of his support network.
Ant and Dec, who are neighbours in the fashionable west London district of Chiswick, are said to be so close that his stint in rehab was the most time they’ve ever spent apart bar a month-long holiday.
He has recently been linked romantically to fellow Geordie and Saturday Night Takeaway co-star Scarlett Moffatt although she has insisted they’re just friends.
With all this going on the last thing McPartlin needs is a bitter and protracted divorce battle but with so many millions at stake that is just what it might turn out to be.