What’s the weirdest rumour you’ve heard about yourself?” Cat Deeley asks Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. At 11am on a Saturday morning. On Britain’s most-watched children’s television programme. “Uhhh…” Slash stammers. “Getting a blow job in a bar?” Deeley hoots with nervous laughter, her life seeming to flash before her eyes, a parade of youngsters presumably confused off screen. “Moving swiftly on from that!” she cries, as she cleanly, impressively pivots to innocuous questions about touring and reptile bites.
This cult bit of CD:UK ephemera – still on YouTube, albeit in such ramshackle quality that it was presumably taped off live TV in 2000 via morse code – is a testament to the genius of Cat Deeley. CD:UK and SM:TV Live, the celebrated double bill of ITV kids’ shows that transformed Deeley into a shiny-haired icon of Noughties Britannia, was built on this kind of got-in-late-last-night naughtiness. She was a major part of it, gamely mucking in as one of “the beautiful Corrs” – the semi-regular send-up of the Irish pop group; poor brother Jim having to do with a bag over his head – or serving as the Jennifer Aniston figure in the show’s Friends spoof Chums. But she was also tasked with steering both shows, holding together a pair of programmes always within spitting distance of spiralling completely out of control. Slash or no Slash.
