Ant and Dec: masters of the unoriginal

The annual fest of watching people you will have heard of, may have heard of or have no idea who they are eating animal parts in a jungle island starts on Sunday. Yes I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here is back and is presided over as ever by Ant & Dec. It is curious to think how they career path has taken them. On the back of the popularity of their roles in Byker Gove they lunched a pop career under their character names of PJ & Duncan gaining some modest hits with Let's Get Ready to Rhumble and a cover of The Monkee's Stepping Stone, the pair even managed to receive a Brit nomination for Best Newcomer but were beaten by Oasis to the disquiet of their fans. On TV however the pair bounced around the stations doing different projects with varying degrees of until 1998 they with Cat Deeley would present 2 programmes back to back on Saturday mornings, SM:TV and CD:UK. Both programmes were massive successes but the fact is that pair of them drew heavily on previous programmes, SM:TV owed it's anarchic nature to Tiswas while CD:UK borrowed heavily from early 1980's Top of the Pop and you can see this every week on BBC4. After 3 years the pair left for other and left the Saturday morning kids show to die for good. The pair next popped on Pop Idol where Simon Cowell first displayed his nasty man act though he was not the first as Tony Hatch was even more brutal on 1970's talent show, the 3 obviously liked worked together as they would work on Britain's Got Talent. The pair then launched Saturday Night Takeaway a show which played heavily on the Noel Edmonds Trinity of Late, Late Breakfast Show, Saturday Roadshow and House Party and has been running for years. I'm a Celeb was launched quietly in the summer of  2002 and became a instant hit, however you can see elements of Survivor the US hit that flopped badly when ITV tried to launch on British shores. But the pair have had flops,  there was Slap Bang which was an early evening version of SM:TV, the forgotten pair of  Pokerface and Push the Button. Then came their third outing with Cowell, Red or Black? which saw players trying to pick out challenges in an manner reminiscent of charity game show You Bet, only the Red or Black? players were playing for one million pounds for themselves but the show flopped badly. The next time you see anything that celebrates the Geordie pair ponder on the originality of their ideas