Last Saturday was the final “Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway” and purely by chance, it was also the first one I’ve seen. I’m not sure where I’ve been on Saturday evenings since 2013, but it wasn’t that I was off somewhere criticising or avoiding the show. You can’t watch everything, and I just don’t happen to have tuned in.<\/p>\n
Not ever, actually. Last Saturday I was somewhere that it was on and I caught it by chance. All of this sounds a bit sniffy, like I wouldn’t stoop so low, but as far as I can see from this one edition, it’s a sparklingly well-produced show, a fine example of variety television.<\/p>\n
But it was at BBC Television Centre.<\/p>\n
Sorry, no, it was at Television Centre. There’s a difference. Saturday Night Takeaway is an ITV show but it’s made at what was BBC TVC.<\/p>\n
And I’m watching this, I’m watching how they say that for this last show they are taking over the whole of TVC, and I am shocked how painful it is. Right there behind the DJ is where I would have lunch sometimes with the Ceefax team. Just to the left of screen is where I came around a corner and found my Ceefax editor talking with my Radio Times magazine editor talking with my RadioTimes.com editor and apparently all three women having just that instant realised that I worked for each of them. Moments before I appeared. <\/p>\n
Ant and Dec were in my home.<\/p>\n
Yet I’ve actually lived in a few places, I don’t particularly feel this possessive about any of them. I think it’s the before-and-after sense, the peculiar way that TVC looks like it always did but is not like it ever was. <\/p>\n
I keep coming back to this subject because it keeps coming back to me. But right now, today, I’m looking at it not that TVC is gone, not that these bastards are treading in my living room, but rather that it was a privilege to work there.<\/p>\n
I believe it’s the people who make a place special, but usually I mean the people you know, the people you work with. In this case, in BBC Television Centre’s case, it is all of that plus the decades of amazing people living and breathing and working in those studios and those halls and those offices.<\/p>\n
You can’t go back. But you can watch Ant and Dec perform there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last Saturday was the final “Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway” and purely by chance, it was also the first … Continue reading