Saturday Night Takeaway 2018

Agree with everyone that it was handled as well as it could be and Dec did exceptionally well.

They were fortunate in having Stephen Merchant there, and Davina McCall was a handy presence to have around at the start as Dec worked his way into doing the show himself.

I'm sure the producers know the feedback Scarlett Moffatt gets from a lot of viewers, so shoving her front and centre to effectively replace Ant would have been a bad, bad move - pretty much throwing her under a bus. Stephen Merchant being there as someone for Dec to bounce off was quite a handy compromise.

Given it is Easter weekend you'd usually expect a drop in ratings, so though it is up 400k it's probably up closer to a million to where it would have been had it been a regular Easter weekend edition.

Of course I expect that was never the plan, and it was just one thing of many that the papers made up.

As it was, Mulhern and Moffatt had no bigger role than usual

They did do the audience thing that Ant usually does, with the places on the plane.

http://metro.co.uk/2018/04/02/dec-planning-friends-tribute-best-pal-ant-final-saturday-night-takeaway-episode-7434138/

The tabloids are reporting that in the Florida show, Dec will perform the Friends theme "I'll Be There for You" with The Rembrandts as a tribute to Ant. It may not be true, but The Rembrandts are definitely going to be there for Singalong Live according to ITV.

Sky News reported that Dec was going to give a heart felt speech about Ant on Saturday’s show.

Tabloids also reported that they’d scripted this week’s show rather than ad-libbing the whole show like they usually do

And I doubt either know the truth - there is certainly no way the entire show is ad-libbed - indeed they publish a photo of the script most weeks.

Not only the script...

Lights, camera, action! Well, not quite now, but very, very soon… #SaturdayNightTakeaway pic.twitter.com/Ri8MuxXyAT

— Saturday Night Takeaway (@itvtakeaway) March 10, 2018

Hi

To be honest if the Rembrandts are there for sing a long live, they would have to sing ill be there for you as this is about the only one of there song a British contestant is likely to know any of the words to, and the boys always join in the last verse after the 3 rounds with the contestants, so theirs nothing unusual here really. So just the tabloids reading more into it than there actually is again then.

I wonder how much being off the air for a week would have affected things. The timeslot suffered when The Voice was a straight swap last week. Also, for every person tuning in to go "ooh, how's this going to go then?" another person who really enjoys Ant and Dec might have thought "well it just won't be the same without Ant, why bother tuning in?" In which case, next week is the figure to watch out for.

I really don't think you can read too much into it. It would be a different story should it return next year with just one of them for the entire series, but given the circumstances and it only being two episodes I don't think you can really make any conclusions.

Ironically it probably helped that Ant and Dec pretty much present everything on screen together rather than splitting their roles within a show so they each host separate segments. That meant Dec really wasn't doing anything he didn't normally do so although it wasn't quite right it wasn't significantly different to normal. The only part I thought was notable was in the surprise where although linked to her show you'd assume Ant would have done Davina's role under usual circumstances.

The whole walking from one bit of the set to the other live seemed a bit odd as surely the point of it is to indicate the passage of time on This Time Next Year. With it being called “This Time Next Takeaway” I do wonder if maybe they had recorded the Davina bit with both Ant and Dec at some point in the recent past, as that part of the parody didn’t quite work.