Tess Daly and Vernon Kay are sharing Cosmopolitan's November cover for the magazine's first ever "Men versus Women" issue, which takes a light-hearted look at the battle of the sexes. The presenting couple are used to being rivals on TV, with Tess hosting BBC's Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday nights while Vernon's at the helm of All Star Family Fortunes on the same evening over on ITV. In this joint interview, they battle it out on all aspects of males and females, from weight and surgery to who really is the superior sex. Here are the highlights:

• Vernon on men: "Deep down [men] are all still hunter-gatherers who want to provide food and shelter for our family. We like scratching our nuts and watching football – we’re all the same."
• Tess on Vernon: "Vern’s a typical bloke – there’s no metrosexual in him! I have to beg him to put on a bit of moisturiser in the winter."
• Vernon on Tess's "girly" conversations: "I’ve overheard conversations with Tess and her female friends about girl stuff … and I can’t believe some of things they discuss. They’re way more graphic than blokes. [They] talk about things no man should ever overhear. I don’t care if a man is physically fit or hung like a horse! It’s degrading! It makes us feel tiny. When blokes get together … we don’t talk about genitalia! All we want to know is if they had sex."
• Tess on the difference between men and women: "Men are more cut and dry than women are … We get down to the nitty gritty. We talk about whether he’s Mr Right, what’s wrong with Mr Right, or why he’s not quite Mr Right."

To find out what Tess and Vernon said about weight loss, cosmetic surgery, and whether men or women are the superior sex, just read more.

• On how they would deal with wanting each other to lose weight:
  VK — "Women have got enough body issues to worry about, what with cellulite and all that, without having to diet as well. Men don’t care."
  TD — "If Vern carried it well, I wouldn’t mind. But I don’t like my man wobbly, so he’d have to work at toning up. I’d probably get the rowing machine out of the garage and out of its box as a hint."
• On cosmetic surgery:
  VK — "Botox has become so normal, so blokes are like, ‘Whatever’ … it’s become so common that everyone will end up looking the same. There’s only so much you can do with two eyes, a nose and a mouth."
  TD — "He does have double standards, though, because he’ll look at a picture in a magazine and say, ‘She looks good’ – when quite clearly she’s had surgery."
• On which is the superior sex:
  VK — "I don’t know how women deal with having so many body issues throughout their lives – periods, pregnancy and, when you’ve done all that, menopause! It sounds like a bloody nightmare if you ask me ….Women will always struggle more because of their physical build … It’s harder for women as well because blokes generally just do what’s needed to get by."
  TD — "Men are completely different species. They’re more functional, we’re more emotional; they like literally, we think laterally. We like to look after people and think of the bigger picture, whereas men are only concerned with getting from A to B … Men never think about the details … Men seem to think there will always be a woman around to pick up after them. They’ve never grown up from when their mums did it for them."
• On figuring each other out:
  TD — "I’d be rubbish if I hadn’t [figured Vernon out] after eight years … But things are always changing, so I’d never say, ‘This is it, for the rest of our lives.’ The trick is to change together. We do that by having shared interests, but also separate interests … I spent my first day of my married life watching Bolton Wanderers at the Reebok Stadium. Sad or what? I’d been before and it terrified me. I couldn’t believe these men were turning into beasts, literally beating their chests and screaming! But then I thought, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’ and before long I was clapping anyway."
  VK — "[We always have a laugh] – Tess has still got that disco spark she had when we first met. I love it."

It certainly sounds like Tess and Vernon are well suited, even with their differences. The full interview appears in the November issue of Cosmopolitan out now.

Photo credit Perry Hagopian