It's Ant and duct! Presenter McPartlin reveals his painfully swollen eye and jokes he 'needs to cry more' after being sidelined on his day off with a blocked tear duct

Ant McPartlin has joked that he 'needs to cry more' after a blocked tear duct left him with a horrifically swollen eye. 

The presenter confirmed he'd been sidelined with the irritation, detectable through watery eyes, sticky discharge and crusty eyelids, while recording his latest Hanging Out podcast with Declan Donnelly on Thursday. 

Sharing a photo of the affected eye with Donnelly and their production team, McPartlin, 50, admitted he looked like he'd taken a punch to the face. 

He said: 'You know when you watch Rocky, and at the end there's all the prosthetics and he's been beaten up and he's got a big black eye? It looks like prosthetics, but it's a blocked tear duct - apparently I need to cry more.' 

The presenter revealed he'd taken a selfie of the swollen eye while queuing up to collect prescribed antibiotics from a local pharmacy, adding: 'You can see my eye's bad, you can tell by my expression I'm not in the best of mood's because my eye's bad on my day off. It's ruined my day off.

'When I picked up my antibiotics, the pharmacist asked for a selfie! Of course, I said yes, so there's a pharmacist out there somewhere with a selfie of me looking like that.' 

The eye was still swollen when the presenting duo appeared on Friday evening's instalment of The Graham Norton Show, which is filmed in front of a studio audience - resulting in frantic attempts to cover it before they took to the stage. 

'It took a while to go down, days to go down,' he recalled. 'And I saw [Dec] since and it was bigger, but we were doing Graham Norton and we had to put lots of makeup on it'  

He added: 'It felt like it was blocked with an orange, that's how bad it felt, but it's getting better.' 

The presenters were joined by actress Claire Foy, Stranger Things star Joe Keery and rapper Tinie Tempah during Friday's appearance on the BBC show. 

McPartlin revealed the pair had followed King Charles for a year for a TV programme and were invited to spend the night before their final interview with the then-Prince of Wales at his Dumfries House residence in Ayrshire.

He told Norton: 'We were like ‘Hell, yes!’ It was amazing and everything you’d imagine. I tried on the robe that was in my room and ran out into the corridor to find Dec and there was the prince.

'He said "hello" and started talking to me about pruning roses. I was so embarrassed.”

Donnelly added: 'We then had wine in the room and got a bit noisy. We took it a bit far and were asked to be quiet.'

Asked about their new podcast, Hanging Out with Ant & Dec, Donnelly said: 'We know each other inside out and we make each other laugh, so hopefully people will like it.

'Our wives are more nervous than us – they think we might give too much away.'

The podcast is hosted on their newly launched digital entertainment channel, Belta Box, which also features brand-new digital formats alongside classic Ant and Dec moments from some of their best-loved shows.

The series is completely unscripted, with no agenda and no interruptions, and finds the pair catching up, reminiscing about their decades-long friendship and reflecting on their careers. 

Belta Box is available across several major digital platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.