Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly threatened to quit ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ after footage of them was edited out.
The presenting duo were furious when footage of them was cut from the televised show and they spoke to boss Simon Cowell about leaving the programme.
Speaking in their new autobiography ‘Once Upon A Tyne’, Ant, 44, said: "It was on a trip to America, in 2012, where we had to have a serious conversation with Simon. The previous series of ‘BGT’ had been especially tricky for us two.
"The audition days had been very long, which in itself we don’t mind, but after filming interviews and interacting with every single act, as well as making jokes, giving reactions and everything else we always do, we found that when the show went out on TV, we hardly seemed to feature in it at all.
"We began to feel that we were wasting our time doing the auditions because all the footage of the work we were doing was ending up on the cutting-room floor."
Dec, 44, added: "We’d been to see the bosses at ITV and told them we were strongly considering leaving ‘BGT’.
"At that stage, it felt like it may as well have been anyone hosting the show and we said that when our current contract expired, we thought it was time to move on.
"This isn’t something we’re in the habit of doing and they aren’t easy conversations to have, but we felt like honesty was the best policy.
"I remember waking up in Birmingham on the last day of the 2012 tour, opening my curtains and thinking, ‘Well, this is the last time I’ll be doing this’."
However, Simon, 60, asked the pair to fly to Los Angeles to meet with him and he convinced them to stay.
They said: "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."