I can't wait for Dick and Dom on the stage

Dominic Wood, the "Dom" half of Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow, is a half-pint-sized popsie. He is terribly small, like a Hobbit, is 28 but looks about 20, and is very tanned as he has just returned from holidaying in St Lucia with his wife Sandi. She is waiting with him at the table and she is as small and as cute as he is. As they sit chatting, people keep staring at Dom in a vaguely bemused fashion, wondering who he is.

But if they had a nine-year-old with them, like my eldest son, who wet himself with delight when I told him I was meeting Dominic Wood for lunch, they would know very well who he is. He is Dom!

Dick & Dom In Da Bungalow must have been the most talked-about, wonderful (or dreadful, depending on your point of view) show that has ever been aired on the planet. And now, even though it still had hundreds of thousands of small viewers, it is over. "Yes," says Wood sadly, "we decided to finish it after the last series." Why? Because it was so controversial? (There were more than 40 complaints when he and his on-screen partner Richard McCourt, aka Dick, pretended to give birth during the programme.) "No, we wanted to quit while the going was good," says Wood. "Also, we've had a lot on our plate."

Last June, just before Dominic and Sandi, a former member of pop group All Stars turned property developer, were about to get married, they found out that Sandi's father Tommy had cancer. "We were about to fly to Ibiza," says Wood. "We'd organised this wonderful wedding but Tommy had been ill for some time and no one could diagnose what was wrong. He was very tired and had this terrible chest infection and he kept saying, 'Oh I've probably got cancer,' and we kept laughing and saying, 'Of course you haven't.'

"A few days before the wedding, we got a call from the hospital saying that he had myeloma, which is cancer of the plasma, and that he was about to die. I called my father, who is a doctor, and he went very quiet and said, 'You'd better go to the hospital,' so I knew it was serious, and then it turned out that my grandfather had died of myeloma as well."

The upshot was that Dom and Sandi cancelled the wedding and drove to Liverpool where Tommy was in hospital. "Sandi was in shock," says Wood, "and I was on the phone telling everyone that Sandi and I had decided to get married in a registry office there so her father could know we'd got married before he died. We didn't expect anyone to come, but all my family got there somehow. One of my brothers videoed it and we are all crying. I think the registrar was really freaked out."

Shortly after the wedding, Sandi was told her father only had hours to live. "She went to the hospital on Father's Day. She thought it would be the last time she saw him but, when she got there, he was sitting up. It sounds like a cliché but he fought it. He's a strong man and he just refused to die."

Tommy is currently in remission - around one in seven patients survive five years. "You cannot be cured of myeloma, so he will always have it. My grandfather was dead after a year but that was a long time ago. Not many people know about myeloma, but me and Sandi really want to raise awareness about it." Which is why, hold your breath, Dick and Dom are coming back! Yes, this anarchic, students-onragweek-type show, in which Dominic Wood and Richard McCourt got kids to shout "Bogies!" in quiet places such as libraries, is coming to the Bloomsbury Theatre in a one-off charity show for the International Myeloma Foundation (UK).

How on earth are they going to translate it to the stage? "We can't do Bogies or Creamy Muck Muck," says Dom - the latter being a game in which contestants had custard pies thrown at them - "but everything else will be there."

This news will make some people shudder in horror. "Most adults hated it," says Wood cheerily as he waves his chips about, "but kids loved it!" The complaints would not go away. Wood got hauled up after furious parents rang the BBC in droves when, one Saturday morning, he turned up with a T-shirt with Morning Wood written on it. "It was the morning, my name is Wood!" says Wood. Then Tory MP Peter Luff complained in the Commons about the lavatorial content of the show. "It turned out that he'd never seen the show!" says Wood. This incensed the duo and they mercilessly ribbed Luff. "We had a piece of fluff in the corner who kept on yelling: 'This show is disgusting, even though I haven't seen it!" says Wood.

They also wore unflattering Rachel Stevens masks because she was the only celebrity who refused to be covered in custard pies. "It just seemed so stupid to be like that," says Wood. "She's supposed to appeal to kids." Wood, himself, seems to appeal to kids very much. He looks as if he would, at any given moment, stick two chips up his nose. Yet, at heart, he says he is much more conventional. ("Sandi says I'm boring!")

He grew up in Devon, the youngest of four boys, and went to King's College School in Taunton. "I thought I was very stupid as a child," he said. "I am actually dyslexic - even reading an Autocue is difficult - but no one discovered the problem until I was 15." His older three brothers were all in the A-stream but he never made it out of the D-stream. "I found it difficult," he says. "I used to ask them why they were so clever and I wasn't."

HE COPED in two ways. Firstly, he learned how to make people laugh, then he taught himself to do magic. "I saw someone make a pen disappear," he says. "I was transfixed." He has written six books about magic but got chucked out of the Magic Circle by revealing tricks on Dick & Dom. "It was ridiculous," he says, "I didn't reveal anything that hadn't been revealed before. I wrote to them but they said their decision was final and that I'd broken the rules, which I suppose I had."

But isn't he all about breaking rules? "Oh, that's just my on-screen persona," he says. Wood is surprisingly focused. As a child he was transfixed by children's television presenters Phillip Schofield and Andi Peters. "I just wanted to do what they did," he says. So he wrote endless letters to the heads of the BBC and ITV telling them they should give him a job.

His persistence paid off. At the age of 19 - he left school after completing his A-levels - he made a showreel, sent it in to the BBC and found himself employed as a presenter. The other young presenter

there was Richard McCourt. "We hit it off immediately," says Wood. Pretty soon, they were sharing a house off the Hanger Lane Gyratory System. "It was like a permanent party, Men-Behaving-Badly-typeofthing," says Wood.