Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly addressed their huge bust-up with Simon Cowell.

Ant and Dec opened up about falling out with Simon Cowell (Image: Instagram Ant and Dec)

After being the long-running hosts of Britain’s Got Talent, Ant and Dec have admitted that they very nearly quit the show after a major falling-out with judge and boss Simon Cowell. The iconic duo, Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, who have presented the nationwide talent series since its launch in 2007, admitted they were forced to reconsider their role after “not having a nice time”. Although Simon eventually convinced them to stay on the show, their ultimatum came in 2012, when Ant and Dec were unhappy that they weren’t on screen as much and had grown fed up with the 66-year-old’s late arrival for auditions almost every day.

During a new appearance on the Stick to Football podcast, the Geordie pair revealed they flew out to America with the intention of throwing in the towel. Simon listened to them and then “pleaded” with them to stay. Speaking to the sporting icons Gary Neville, Jamie Carragher, Jill Scott, Ian Wright, and Roy Keane, Ant shared: “He’s [Simon] a really charming bloke with a great sense of humour.”

Ant and Dec have been hosting Britain’s Got Talent since 2007 (Image: ITV)

Ant continued: “He’s funny, generous, and we get on well with him. We’ve always kind of had a good relationship with him because we’re quite honest with him and I think he appreciates that.”

“He asks our opinion and trusts our opinion, and I think he respects the fact that we’ve been doing it for as long as we have.”

The presenter recounted: “We’ve been annoyed at him a few times over the years. We went to LA to see him to tell him we were going to leave Britain’s Got Talent because we weren’t having a very nice time.

“He was always late, it was through his period where he would just never turn up on time.” To which Declan added: “We were in the show less and less, it’s taking up a lot of our time, we’re not really in the show, we might as well leave and put our energies elsewhere.

Ant and Dec revealed Simon pleaded for them to stay on BGT (Image: YouTube)

“He went, ‘Oh well, no, you can’t leave, and I’ll turn up on time, and we’ll make sure that you’re featured more and that you’ll have more fun with it.”

Dec recalled: “So we sat there having lunch, and he went, ‘I can’t believe you were thinking of leaving’ and he leaned over in the restaurant in the middle of LA and started tickling me, going, ‘you will never leave me’.”

Ant chimed in: “To be fair to Simon, he sat there, took it all and listened intently for four, maybe five cigarettes.”

Praising Simon, Dec added: “He made a promise to us: That things would change and that we’d never feel like that again.

“He desperately wanted us to stay, and we told him we’d do the next series and see how it went, and, to be fair to him, he was as good as his word; things did change.”