“I’ve got twice the amount of work to do,” said Declan Donnelly, welcoming the ITV audience tonight at 7pm. “Thanks for all the support!” he signed off at 8.30pm.
These were small references to a situation so big, in television terms, that it would have seemed fitting if the commercial breaks had contained ads for a supermarket called only Marks or Spencer and a fashion line made by Dolce without Gabbana, or vice versa. In the world of brands linked by ampersands, an equivalent shock was Dec presenting Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway without Ant. For the first time in their 29 years as a TV double-act, Donnelly hosted solo, following screen partner Ant McPartlin’s decision to enter alcoholism rehab, after a road traffic collision in west London that led to his being charged with drink-driving. McPartlin’s previous period of addiction treatment last year delayed but did not prevent the screening of another Ant & Dec franchise, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! But, with three live editions of the 15th series of Saturday Night Takeaway remaining when McPartlin became unavailable, ITV dropped the 24 March show, but agreed to Donnelly hosting the final two on his own. Rather uncomfortably, transmission began with a trail for Britain’s Got Talent – also fronted by the duo, for which Ant will also be unavailable except in already-filmed segments – and the sting for show sponsors, Suzuki, which has just dropped a series of driving-related ads featuring the presenters. Ant’s face and name remained in the pre-filmed credits. Once live on air, the first big decision was whether Dec should mention his missing friend, and in what tone: a calculation with potential legal (McPartlin is due to appear before Wimbledon magistrates court on Wednesday) and inevitable social media consequences. After the host’s opening reference to his double duties, the shift in personnel was then addressed equally obliquely in some banter from Stephen Merchant, this week’s choice for the regular role of celebrity guest announcer, about the possibility of coming down from the voice booth to fill the “little bit of space on the stage.” In what seemed to be a policy of focusing on the good news, Merchant congratulated Dec, to audience applause, on impending fatherhood. FacebookTwitterPinterest Stephen Merchant added some banter as the episode’s celebrity guest announcer. Photograph: Kieron McCarron/Rex/ShutterstockDonnelly then teasingly mentioned that one of the public participants was in the studio because her planned appearance on a previous edition had been cancelled when “something happened.” Viewers were invited to assume Diane had been on the running order for the cancelled post-arrest show, but it turned out that a heart scare had made her unavailable. The quality of Diane’s cardiac care was then tested by reuniting her with the sister she hadn’t seen for 30 years. The only direct reference to the elephant in the studio came, unexpectedly, when Donnelly mentioned that the venue from which the show comes, London Studios, is about to close. Dec gave viewers a quick video tour of the empty Studio 2, where, he noted, “Ant, Cat [Deeley] and I presented SM: TV Live for so long.” Then, going into the production gallery to have a mock-row about the show’s closing segment, Donnelly complained: “I’ll have to do it myself, like everything else around here this week.” For obvious reasons, the regular segment Ant v Dec had been dropped, but it was not ideal that the long opening item featured people who “want to change something about their life.” It is perhaps a good thing that rehab patients are generally prevented from watching television. ITV had decided that McPartlin could be seen in a pre-filmed segment of the weekly Two Ronnies-style thriller mystery, after which Merchant joshed Dec that “the other guy was good. You should do more with him”. Ant McPartlin’s case shows we can be kind, even to celebritiesBarbara Ellen Read moreVisually, by convention – and, some rumours insist, contract – Ant always stands screen-left and Dec on the right. So producers had to decide whether to frame Donnelly with a poignant gap beside him or shift him to the middle. For most of the 90 minutes, he clung to the centre line, like a tennis player with a long-reaching forehand and backhand. It was hard not to think that the lone presenter sometimes also looked lonely. Practically and psychologically, this was a big deal for Donnelly. In the 29 years since he and McPartlin were first paired as teenage actors on the BBC On1 children’s series Byker Grove, the only previous solo TV appearance by either of them seems to have been Donnelly’s brief appearance as “Stable boy” in The Cinder Path, a 1994 ITV adaptation of a Catherine Cookson novel. When Ernie Wise appeared without Eric Morecambe, there was a terrible tinge of widower about him. Things aren’t thankfully as final as that for Ant & Dec. Donnelly was typically – and, in the circumstances, courageously – professional and engaging. But ITV has built its schedules around one act to a degree unprecedented in TV history. What future now for Takeaway, I’m a Celebrity and Britain’s Got Talent. The network must, while relieved about tonight having gone as well as it could, be deeply nervous about their huge Ant-sized gap. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/mar/31/ant-decs-saturday-night-takeaway-handles-missing-presenter-with-aplomb
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