Declan Donnelly will have a new co-host for the forthcoming series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here, breaking his longstanding partnership with Ant McPartlin.
ITV’s director of programmes, Kevin Lygo, said the channel would soon announce a stand-in host for the reality TV show while McPartlin takes time off to deal with an addiction to prescription drugs.
“He’s not going to go to the jungle; Dec is and we will find someone to stand next to Dec,” Lygo told an audience at the Edinburgh TV festival.
Lygo said he had lined up an established presenter for the role, but would not reveal their name until nearer the time: “It’s going to be Piers Morgan! No, I don’t know, it could be Jeremy Corbyn. I can’t say!”
Ant and Dec have been mainstays of ITV’s coverage for two decades, winning enormous audiences for shows such as Saturday Night Takeaway and I’m a Celebrity, and their absence from screens could have a serious impact on the channel’s revenue.
The pair – so inseparable that they even share the same social media accounts – had insisted they would always work as a pair. In their joint autobiography, published in 2010, McPartlin said: “We made an agreement – whatever happened, we’d be mates for ever, and neither one of us would ever be on our own out there.”
However, McPartlin has since struggled with an addiction to prescription drugs and the breakdown of his marriage, which was followed by a conviction for drink-driving after crashing his car. Earlier this month, he announced he would step down from all TV presenting work until 2019, causing the cancellation of the next series of Saturday Night Takeaway.
Lygo said McPartlin was now on the road to recovery: “The good news is that he’s doing really well. He’s doing everything he should be doing to get better. We collectively all thought, let’s give him a good amount of time off. This is a slow procedure, that’s what we’ve decided to do.”
He added Ant & Dec were “professional and fastidious” about their shows and would not want to lower their standards by rushing back before McPartlin was ready. “They will be back next year, but Dec’s going into the jungle. He will be doing it with somebody.”
