Quitting 'SM:TV Live' was "gut-wrenching" for Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly.
Ant and Dec
The pair recently reunited with their former co-host Cat Deeley for a special programme 'The Story of SM:TV Live', to celebrate the show, and they revealed that the decision to leave in 2001 was extremely difficult.
Ant explained: "We'd talked about leaving for a little while, and then ITV came to us and said, we've got a new show called 'Pop Idol'. We knew that the plans were to make this show huge and we knew we couldn't do both."
Dec added: "It was gut-wrenching to leave because we loved the show, it was part of our lives.
"We'd spent three years on it, but also we'd worked on it from the conception of the show up until the very last day with that fantastic show. Even now I'm like oh god, I hate the thought of us having left."
Although 'SM:TV Live' was a huge success, the presenting duo surprisingly revealed that they initially turned it down.
Ant said: "ITV say to you, 'how about doing three hours every Saturday morning? Not just for 28 weeks a year, for 52 weeks a year, for the whole year?' And we went no."
Dec said: "We were like, 'we'll do the music show, but we're not doing that. Cartoons and all that? Pfft'."
Tagged in Declan Donnelly Ant McPartlin