EXCLUSIVE: Dick and Dom open up about what they’ve been up to since leaving children’s TV back in 2018 after a 20-year career on CBBC – with the duo still working together
Everyone say “Bogies!” – Dick and Dom are back and determined to be a “force for good” for those who “grew up” seeing the pair on their TV screens.
Richard ‘Dick’ McCourt and Dominic ‘Dom’ Wood have always been a “force for good” by making people laugh, they told the Mirror. For years, the double act presented children’s TV shows like the BAFTA-winning Dick & Dom in da Bungalow and Splatalot, becoming icons for the late millennials and early Gen-Zers that watched them on a Saturday morning.
Now, the pair want to help that same generation of children turned young adults, but helping them make sure they have the DIY skills to get their deposits back from landlords when moving flat. Partnering with Google’s AI Gemini, Dick & Dom are encouraging young renters to use AI to help them learn how to plaster over holes they drilled to hang up a picture or polish a scratch out of a table to make sure landlords don’t take all of their deposit.
But if the pair are so well-known for children’s television, why move to an older audience? “The kids that grew up with us, you know, they’re all between like 18 and 35 now. So it’s kind of like we’ve all grown up together,” said Dick. “And, you know, from the experiences Dom and I had of renting properties, we know exactly how that feels for a landlord or an estate agent to be taking money off you for tiny little things that you could have fixed yourself.
“I like to think we’re still guiding our audience, you see. We’ve been with them since the beginning. We’re going to carry on being together. We’re a force for good now. We are teaching them the ways of the world.”
“And before you know it, we’ll be hosting Gardener’s World as well!” Dom jokes. He and Dick used to rent a flat together almost 25 years ago. “We were pretty good tenants on the whole,” Dom added.
Dick looked back at their time as flatmates and remarked on how times have changed. “Back then, landlords were a bit more lenient in terms of, you know, bits and bobs that had been done to the house. And we’re not talking about major damage, we’re just talking about normal things, like putting nails into walls to hang up pictures and stuff.”
Dom added: “These days, inventory companies are assigned to try and make sure that the place is exactly, and rightly so, exactly the same as when the tenant moved in. But the problem is, you know, if you move in, and let’s say you put up like six or seven pictures up on the wall, that’s six or seven holes.”
But we don’t always think about it what might affect our deposits, they continued to say. “You’re trying to make a place your own home,” Dom pointed out. “Let’s say if you’re there over Christmas time, you think, ‘Oh, I’m going to nail up a bit of tinsel, or I’m going to do a bit of this, put some decorations up.’ You never really think about, ‘Oh, hang on a minute, what happens if I need to move out? Am I going to get charged for all this?’ It’s crazy!
“When you move out, the landlord can say, ‘Right, well, I’m going to have to get a professional decorator in to fill all the holes in the walls, and then sand them all down, and then repaint the whole wall so that it all matches up together’. And then before you know it, you’ve had like £350 deducted from your deposit.”
And that’s where Gemini comes in. The duo spoke about how they could use AI to teach them how to fix a scratched coffee table for way less than a landlord might charge to replace it. “The great thing about this AI tool is that literally you point the camera at the problem. We tested it out in a flat in London, and we pointed it at a scratched coffee table. Now, a landlord could say, ‘We need a whole new table now because it’s scratched,'” Dom explained. But AI told them exactly how to do a DIY patch up and where to get the materials.
“It was unbelievable. And so it’s all those little tiny tricks that can help you retain your deposit,” he added. Both he and Dick continued to acknowledge that DIY can feel really daunting when you’re a complete beginner.
“It still takes a lot of patience and understanding to put up something like a flatpack bookshelf. But I genuinely think if you’ve got the guts to be able to do that, then you can then lend your hand to the next thing.”
And that goes for careers too, as Dick & Dom both know. Since presenting kids television, the two have done radio shows, DJ sets and been on the West End. But what “means the world” to them is the legacy they’ve left for the children they made laugh.
“Students are coming up to us now or just in the street families say thank you so much,” Dick said. “And they really mean it. ‘Thank you so much for just making us laugh and bringing joy to our household every Saturday morning,’ which is such a nice thing to hear.”
Dom added: “They said, ‘Thank you for making me laugh as a kid’. It meant the world to me. And we had no idea that it meant so much. And it was lovely to hear. It really was. It’s like when you have a favourite teacher, you’ll remember them forever, won’t you?”
Dick & Dom’s partnership with Google Gemini AI, ‘Dick & Dom in Da Rented Flat’, launched on Instagram @DickandDomofficial on 1st October 2025.
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