The prospect of an Antless Saturday Night Takeaway is unsettling for many reasons. Obviously, there’s the big fear being that Dec will be left mumbling unanswered set-ups into a howling void of despair like a Garfield Minus Garfield strip. But it goes beyond that. Ant and Dec are a pillar of Saturday night television. They’re a load-bearing wall. Take them away and the utter sham of Saturday night telly comes into horribly stark focus. Honestly, look at the state of it.
Look at how ITV has reshuffled the schedules this week, for example. In the absence of Takeaway there’s an episode of The Voice (a six-year-old riff on a 17-year-old format) and Through The Keyhole (a five-year-old riff on a 31-year-old format). Things are no better on BBC One, which is listlessly shovelling up the 1078th episode of Casualty, the 88th episode of a decade-old Nick Knowles game show that nobody has ever watched on purpose and a celebrity version of a decade-old daytime gameshow that this week counts Zammo from Grange Hill as a contestant. By some distance, this last one is the best thing on, and it’s got Zammo from Grange Hill in it for God’s sake.
At its best, Saturday night television can unite audiences in a way that most non-sport programming simply isn’t capable of. When it succeeds, it’s event television. This week in 1992, the most watched non-soap show was Noel’s House Party. More people watched The National Lottery than almost anything else in 1994. In 2002, more people watched Pop Idol than the World Cup. In 2009, the four most-watched shows of the year were made up of two Britain’s Got Talents and two X Factors.
But things have curdled. The most-watched show of 2015 and 2016 was the Great British Bake Off, tucked away in midweek without a shiny floor to be seen. Last year it was Blue Planet II. Strictly still came second, but things must be bad if people would rather watch a grief-stricken whale than a happy show about people in spandex cheating on their partners.
This decline might be down to the age of our Saturday night mainstays; X Factor and Strictly both turn 15 this year, for instance, while Britain’s Got Talent turns 12 and Take Me Out turns eight. If that’s the case, it suggests that viewers are getting bored of watching identical episodes of identical shows. Then again, the decline of Saturday night television also coincides with the rise of streaming services. Perhaps people only watched these shows because there wasn’t anything better on. It’s certainly hard to look at the 1990s, with top tens filled with You’ve Been Framed and It’ll Be Alright On The Night and Auntie’s Bloomers and Before They Were Famous, and imagine people watching anything like that now YouTube exists.
The truth is probably a combination of both. Even with a mean age of 61, the BBC One audience doesn’t want to watch regurgitated versions of old formats, which might explain why Mel and Sue recently had their Generation Game episode order slashed in half.
America has attempted to revive event television with huge live musicals, like Peter Pan and Grease, that combine A-list talent with the uneasy sensation that anything could go wrong at any moment. Meanwhile, the UK just shoves out lazy rehashes of past successes again and again and wonders why people are tuning out. The first Antless episode of Saturday Night Takeaway is going to be huge, because to some extent it’ll be the finale of a soap opera we’ve all been caught up in, but there’ll be nothing left once the initial blaze of curiosity burns out.
It’s easy to characterise the Saturday night television audience as a bunch of inert, yokels who ask for nothing more than a shiny floor and a theme tune that they can consistently fail to clap along in time to – it’s really easy; I do it all the time – but in truth this does them a vast disservice. They deserve better than they’re being offered. The whole genre is stuck in a rut. I don’t know the answer – and if I did, I’d rather sell it than spurt it out across a free-to-read blogpost – but I’m sure it doesn’t involve treating the audience like morons. That’s how we ended up with monstrosities like I Love My Country and Don’t Scare The Hare and Len Goodman’s Partners In Rhyme. Saturday night television is teetering on the edge of collapse. If the big new thing doesn’t happen soon, it’ll all be over.
