I had a dream last night that Ant and Dec were luring us all into subterranean wig-mines at the behest of Emperor Trump.
In the dream I had found a particularly good lode of Trump’s wiry flaxen pelt in a crevasse and was pulling it forth with a pick. You were telling me you’d actually voted for Trump in the global elections, and that, when all was said and done, you still thought he was a better choice than the other candidate, Danny Healy-Rae. We both agreed that it was better than a Fine Gael minority government supported by Fianna Fáil. Ant and Dec were chuckling delightfully from their levitating surveillance platform. I woke up gently screaming.
It was only a dream (everything in that last paragraph is fantastical, after all) but those chortling abominati could, quite frankly, lure the general population into anything. Diminutive, toddler-like creatures with giant heads, big eyes and rosy cheeks, they were, of course, designed by the same UK television geneticists who created the Teletubbies, to seem approachable and trustworthy. Frankly, we’d follow those giggling pod people anywhere.
"Let's stop pretending we're Irish"
On Sunday, UTV Ireland celebrated its recent takeover by ITV by having their in-house Lord Haw Haws introduce us to our transitional pre-Trump overlords, the British royals, in a programme called When Ant and Dec Met the Prince (or, if you prefer, Celebrity Benefit Street). It was as if the new management had instituted a "let's stop pretending we're Irish" policy and figured that an hour-and-a- half of deep immersion in British royalty would do the trick.
Prince Charles is a baffled-looking pensioner in a nice jacket who is the future king of England. The ostensible purpose of this programme is to look at his work with his Prince’s Trust charity. In theory, it sees Ant and Dec given a year of access to the future king, but in reality it amounts to an hour-and-a-half of Ant and Dec wearing interesting blazers and being delighted that they were getting to ride in the prince’s cars, sleep in the prince’s beds and eat the prince’s canapés. They are basically Rosencrantz and Guildenstern crossed with Goldilocks.
Clear dynamic
They establish a clear dynamic early on. The prince waffles poshly while Ant and Dec purr and chortle. The prince seems to regard them as amusing new pets. They are delighted by any evidence of princely humanity as though these are major scoops – the fact the prince's children like him or that the prince has lips rather than mandibles or the fact he eats canapés rather than insect larvae.
They get some time with Camilla but it’s not meant to be an interview, so they make excruciating small talk until she wanders out of the room, the camera trained on her as she departs. They have more luck with the princelings Harry and William, who have learned about conversation from television. These ruddy, oversized humans make jokes about Ant and Dec’s height and presumably in the outtakes they have flashbacks to public school and beat the shit out of them.
Ant and Dec also meet the prince’s old navy comrades, where they decide that it was in the navy that he first “got to know people from across the social spectrum”. Only in the context of royalty would the military, with its codified system of rank, seem like a classless utopia.
They accompany the prince to a prison where, socially conscious as always, Ant and Dec joke about being “too pretty for prison” and feign surprise that the prisoners are not “animals”. Yes, lest you were in doubt, Ant and Dec are total pricks. They also go to a supermarket with the prince to meet beneficiaries of the trust, where Dec dresses like a deli-worker (because having a real job is inherently funny to them), and they gloss over a “journalistic ambush” during which a journalist shouts an unvetted question at their master (about the future monarch’s lobbying letters to Tony Blair).
Indeed, so little entertainment does a year with the prince provide that even Ant and Dec, raised from childhood to present television, struggle. They pad out the action by goofing around with video diaries. They spend minutes watching home movies of the prince as a wealthy toddler. They even take time to visit Byker Grove, the location of the teen drama where they first found fame. There Dec, recalling his lost humanity, starts to cry.
Cooking, serving and butling
The Prince's Trust is genuinely a good thing. It helps disadvantaged young people out of poverty. Of course, it does so by lauding education and self-confidence and the dignity of low-paid work, rather than by undermining the class structures that lead to disadvantage (the clue is in the name, really).
And the fact the programme culminates with several alumni of the trust cooking, serving and butling for the prince, his hyuck-hyucking wingmen and, incongruously, a snakeskin clad Rod Stewart, does make it look like it’s secretly just a way to hire new help.
“Are you going to miss us?” Ant and Dec ask the prince after a year speaking banalities to privilege. “Course,” says the prince. Then he walks back through the palace in slow motion, looking a little like the Sasquatch, who at this point seems more real to me.
Davina comes to life
Davina McCall is, like Ant and Dec, a clever, witty broadcaster who has chosen to specialise in dumb television. This week she makes a break for freedom in Life at the Extreme (Monday, UTV Ireland) a nature programme about survival in extreme environments.
In the first episode, she visits Namibia where she cradles an aardvark, races a cheetah and patronises a gecko. Yes, I know McCall's programmes from The Jump to Celebrity Big Brother have prepared her to curate menageries of freakish creatures, but this is something very different for McCall.
She is clearly smart and funny, but in the aforementioned celebrity circuses, she uses these qualities to generate soul deadening imitations of emotion. In Life at the Extreme her face radiates real joy and interest. She says things like "I just can't believe that's a giraffe in the wild" and she looks moved in a manner she does not when saying, for instance, "I just can't believe that's Arg from The Only Way is Essex in the wild."
It’s joyous, beautifully filmed, fact-filled television and McCall risks cheetah bites, dehydration and burnt feet to demonstrate the realities of life in the desert.
“I’d be desperate if you dropped me here,” she says with wonder while surveying miles of sand dunes, unaware she is inadvertently pitching a celebrity reality TV show which she will one day present.
