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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.

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