Does this mean we’ll have to start cooking?
Saturday nights are about to look very different now, thanks to Ant & Dec’s decision to retire one of our favourite TV shows. While they continue to make us laugh, cringe, and cry every week at the moment, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway will be coming to an official end in April, having first launched back in 2002.
The duo announced last year they’d be “taking a break” from the much-loved variety show after 20 series. We’re still not over One Direction taking “a bit of a hiatus” in 2015, so we all know what Ant & Dec really mean by “break” – it’s over and they’re just trying to protect our feelings.
Ant said, “We just thought it was the perfect time with series 20. It seemed like a natural point to pause, celebrate, take a break, look back and reflect on how we want the show to look in future.”
Dec added, “You can’t do that while the show is on air, because it’s such an all-year-round process, filming the Undercovers, Get Out Of Me Ear and the public pranks. We felt you need to come off air for a pause before you can decide what you want to do with it.”
A WINNING FORMAT
Saturday Night Takeaway has long been part of the furniture, a beacon of hope and a decent plan when you fancy a night in. It has a fail-proof mix of live and pre-recorded entertainment segments, games and competitions that have kept viewers glued for two decades.
But how did it become such a hit? Well, they certainly made their fair share of mistakes. To become the show we know and love today, Ant & Dec had to do away with several dodgy segment ideas. Banged Up With Beadle involved a member of the public spending seven days in a dungeon with Jeremy Beadle, and Jim Didn’t Fix It featured people who wrote into Jimmy Savile’s show but didn’t have their dreams come true given a second chance to realise them. No prizes for guessing why that one was canned.
