Saturday Night Takeaway 2021

In the last series I’m pretty sure they just had the same act on at the start and at the end.

When they get back to normal with a studio audience I wish they’d stop having an opening musical performance, I think it results in the start being too short and too awkward, with Ant and Dec having to just fill messing about between their intros and the song finishing.

Agree it doesn’t work especially well but I guess they’re doing it every week this year because they can’t do the usual run through the audience so it’s a way of doing something different rather than making the lack of audience really apparent at the start of the show.

Thought it was a better show than last week. Do think it’s suffering from a lack of audience and restrictions but the features were better this week and Davina’s bit was great.

Is it just me, or does the £200,000 Andi Peters random giveaway take the shine off WIn the Ads a bit?

Is there any info on how many people enter each week?

His appearances take the shine off any programme

I totally agree about it being better this week, the Davina ‘... get out of me ear’ was one of the best ones I’ve seen, mainly because it used a different idea with the filming for an app, etc. The fencing game was brilliant too imo, and I enjoyed the Tom & Jerry end of the show show too.

From a presentational point of view, I love the use of the screens for the picking a contestant for win the ads, and liked how they did the seamless walk on during episode 1, I expected them to do more of their entrances in a similar way in the screens interacting with the audiences and then walking out and down the stairs.

I totally agree and this series just feels so childish and cringe.

The Poundland Morecambe & Wise act has got to stop too. It’s not funny and it’s so old hat. They don’t need to do that and they work best just bring themselves. Every time they start one of those routines I wince. Then the jazz hands come out and I want to scream at the tv.

I appreciate they don’t have an audience this year and we are lucky to get a show at all given all that work that goes in but I just wish they wouldn’t go for this lowest common denominator crap that so many shows have done over the years. For me, it signals that the end is nigh and ideas have run out.

The show has always been a bit daft and that’s great, but it’s gone from daft to just outright pathetic. Jokes you can see coming from half way down the road and a real sense that the show is now for kids with adults an afterthought.

The same happened with Benidorm (though you could argue that’s an even bigger jump as it was very definitely an adult show to begin with) and by the last series, all the characters had been made as though they didn’t have a brain cell between them and it was being written as a family show.

The Royle Family is another example of this. A pretty normal family in series 1 where you could believe we were looking into their living room and it had real understated comedy. Each character had their own mind and personality with a full working brain. By the end of the run, the jokes were signposted playground humour at best and none of them could find their own a*se with both hands.

I'll tell you what makes me cringe, is that word in that context. When did the word stop being 'cringeworthy'.

Sorry just a personal annoyance. 😬

Yes by the end of The Royle Family we were invited to laugh at Denise and Dave a bit too much- rather than with them- and it became very cartoonish- the frozen turkey in the bath etc.

Forgive me for furthering going off topic. Caroline Aherne said they wanted The New Sofa to be more lighthearted because she felt The Queen of Sheba, which preceded it, was too dark. I felt this neutered the whole point of the show, because like any family (relatability being one of the big appeals of the show) you take the rough with the smooth. No family goes through one heartache and has endless japes afterwards.

I felt Joe's Crackers was the closest they got to rekindling the old formula. There's still plenty of silly slapstick in there, but there are lots of heartwarming moments such as Joe coming to terms with losing Mary, Antony planning to propose to Saskia, and the bond between both the Royle's and Joe and Cheryl becoming stronger by the end of the episode.

Having watched The Royle Family several times I feel like the dumbing down of Dave and Denise started as early as the second series, although I don't think it gets anywhere near as bad as in the third series with the baby.

Controversially, I find the 2009 special 'The Golden Egg Cup' to be really funny… but you do have to pretend that it's not the same show as it was in 1998, the characters and writing are just so different.

Not a fan of the ones that came after that, though. I don't think I've watched them since they were first on.

They totally changed the character of Dave after series one. If you watch series one, Dave is not stupid. He was more a "Jack the Lad" man, just listen to the way he spoke, he also was more sharper and also not exactly warm. Watching series one, he is a totally different character.

Apparently Caroline felt he should be more softer, family friendly, and both Craig and Caroline rewrote the character from Series Two, and also started to make Dave's parents less hard and sharp too, as in Series One we were given the impression that Dave's dad was cold, work shy, living off benefits etc, and it was nothing to the portrayal of him in the 2008 Christmas Special.