Skip to main content

Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway: is it time for Dec to fly solo?

Although most will be wishing him well, some ghoulish viewers will be hoping Dec slowly unravels into a performance of phantom limb syndrome

Dec. Dec. Roll it around your mouth a little, try to say it without the tart-sour taste on your tongue: Dec. Just: Dec. “Dec.” Ladies and gentlemen … Dec! Something is wrong. You can feel it, deep in your soul. You can feel the spiritual rift. Something is misaligned in the universe and everything now feels cosmically altered. Tonight, while Ant recuperates away from the limelight following his drink-drive arrest, it’s on Dec to host Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway entirely Ant-less. There is something sinister about this, and I hate it.

We have to admit now that Ant and Dec are the bedrock on which British culture is made, and pay them dues accordingly. For blockbuster Saturday night TV everyhosts who leaped fully formed from a harrowing drama scene in which one of them had their eyes shot out, they have between them an astonishingly delicate touch: funny, original, soft with the civilian guests and perfectly hard with the VIPs. They can do everything from T-shirt-and-jacket-clad-giggling presenting (I’m a Celeb, Britain’s Got Talent) to black-tux-and-a-clean-link pedigree stuff (the Brits, The X Factor). They are the best at what they do, but they are very crucially just that: a “they”, a collective. Dec without Ant is the sun without the moon, and this Saturday we will have to stare unblinkingly into it, waiting for our irises to turn white.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2pQ2dlf
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Thirty Years of Adonis film review: sexually explicit gay drama mixes porn and pomposity

1/5 stars The line between soft-core porn and pompous art-house cinema grows ever finer in the seventh feature by writer, director and producer Danny Cheng Wan-cheung, also known as Scud. Intended as a philosophical statement about the meaninglessness of life, Thirty Years of Adonis instead comes across as a badly misjudged piece of sensationalist filmmaking. God’s Own Country review: gay love story set in the Yorkshire countryside The film revolves around aspiring gay actor Adonis Yang... from South China Morning Post - Culture feed https://ift.tt/2qgQkop
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more