Bump & Dec
Cowell blames chiefs for grumpy style
PREGNANT Ali Astall looks swell in a white sun dress as she joins husband Declan Donnelly at a music festival.
The couple, expecting their first child in September, kept their cool in the sweltering heat while enjoying acts including Nile Rodgers & Chic, Manic Street Preachers and Rita Ora.
And Dec, who’s used to standing on the right and dressing to match his troubled TV partner Ant Mcpartlin, did the same with Ali as he wore a crisp white shirt and shades for the House Festival at Kenwood House in Highgate, North London. SIMON Cowell says his Mr Nasty persona was created by US TV bosses – and insists he is nothing like that in real life.
Cowell, 58, said the producers of American Idol came up with the grumpy style – and it has stuck ever since.
But the Britain’s Got Talent boss admits he was miserable while filming much of the hit show, which made his name in the US, from 2002 to 2010. He said: “I was not grumpy the whole time.
“They just decided, the producers, it would be funnier to make me looking miserable and it was sort of an accident.
“I found the process so miserable, I hated it.”
He even expected the show to fail and said: “I thought we might have a couple of years. I wasn’t paid the first year I went on TV. I wasn’t even thinking about it. It was like, I can probably do a better job at electing the artists than anyone else so I’ll do it, then it all went kinda nuts.
“We didn’t think the show in those days would be more valuable than the music component. I just couldn’t bear it at the end. It wasn’t fun. Sometimes with success it becomes a happy place, sometimes success becomes the opposite.
“I always promised myself that once I got that Sunday evening feeling or the Monday morning feeling of, ‘God, I’ve got to go to work today’, it was time to stop – and I got that.”
He said he owes much of his initial Stateside success to fellow judge Paula Abdul.
He added: “God was really smiling at us the day that she turned up. I realised in five minutes. Well first of all, I didn’t think she would last the day. Lunch time she quit. And then three other times that day. But, I was thinking, this is incredible. I mean, I got it.”