In Praise of Ant and Dec

The Caesars' masons carved out grossly inflated statues for them and set them up in every square in the Empire. King George the Fourth appeared before court painter Sir Thomas Lawrence pre-inflated (he liked to eat most of his meals in bed), and had to be encased in so much high-tension corsetry he might have farted off through the window at any moment like a snapped balloon. King Charles the First was seriously short, just 5’4”. Sir Anthony Van Dyck had to paint him sitting on a horse, and even that didn't work. 

Making royals look good may well be the world’s second oldest profession.

Our twenty-first century has its own version of this smoke-and-mirrors. They are called Ant and Dec. With their compact dimensions (the dark haired one (Ant) is 5'8''and the blond one (Dec) just 5'6'' ) they make the Prince of Wales look, well, tall. And they are ever so convenient. They can be intertwined and transported between gigs in the footwell of a Smart Car. 

But the purpose of this blog is to deliver itself of a paean to the pint-sized pair.

What more harmless way to frame someone who is, well, ineluctably different from most of us in a way that makes him understandable, palatable, likeable even, than to place him between such an unthreatened and unthreatening pair of bookends? "Ooh missus, get us, up here on television, and standing next to funny old Great Uncle Eustace from Alpha Centauri".

But this is the silent cry of surprise bordering on mystification Ant and Dec so brilliantly weave into all of their performances. "What on earth have we got going for us, just two ordinary lads from the north east?" they seem to be saying. And they have been saying the same thing wordlessly since they started presenting television programmes in the late 1980s.  

This is both utterly ludicrous and a brilliant and enduring ruse at the same time.

These lads who are so permanently gobsmacked by their presence on the goggle box have had, according to their Wikipedia entry, a "very successful career as television presenters". This is a bit like saying Richard Nixon had some PR issues. They reputedly earn ￡23,000 a day, and are each regularly valued at between ￡50m and ￡75m. Without the upkeep of several vast palaces to worry about, that's probably more disposable wedge than the Prince of Wales. This is partly because they must be very, very hard working. They never seem to be off the largest screen in the house, popping up on everything from cookery programmes to celebrity jungle adventures.  

This is why every self-respecting university should be commissioning a feasibility study into whether or not to open a School of Ant and Dec Studies. I'm not being ironic. I'm perfectly serious. It would be a sort of Applied Media Studies with entrepreneurial cojones.

But for now, their likeability is enduringly adamantine, like the doors of the Duomo in Florence. When they pop up accidentally as I'm flicking through my five hundred recordings of classic Frasier they always make me smile.  You could launch against them with a fully armed Trident submarine and they would bat the nukes away with an "Ooh, look at those big nasty metal things, they can't possibly be directed at us."   

Watch them at work, and watch them closely. These two define mass market performance professionalism for the twenty-first century.

Next stop USA.  If Daphne Moon could do it...