It’s always tough trying to follow popular presenters on a TV series, as the producers ofThis Morning would no doubt tell you. How many chancers filled the gap between Chris Evans and Johnny Vaughan on The Big Breakfast? Who now remembers Emma Ledden and Steve Wilson’s brief stint on Live & Kicking? Why did anyone think Chris Wenner would be an equally adept follow-up for John Noakes on Blue Peter? It’s even harder when the presenters have been associated with the programme from day one, and so when Ant and Dec left SM:TV Live last month, the producers had their work cut out trying to find a replacement.

However the programme had two factors which helped a lot. The first is, of course, Cat Deeley, who over the past three years has been equally adept at fronting the show and has provided just as many amusing moments. Cat staying on has at least meant that there’s enough professionalism to ease in the new presenter. The second factor is that the opposition is The Saturday Show on BBC1. Anyone who suggested that now Ant and Dec have gone, the BBC might be able to catch up, must clearly never have seen The Saturday Show. It’s simply not good enough – it’s not funny, and it isn’t particularly interesting – and now contains an outrageous four cartoons as well as LA7, first shown two years ago and already repeated umpteen times. And, despite the claims at the start of the series that it was going to contain “attitude” and be more stylish than Live & Kicking, the BBC have just announced that the only age group it’s made any headway into is that of 4-6 year-olds.

Really, SM:TV could have continued to beat The Saturday Show regardless of who replaced Ant and Dec. Thankfully, the new presenter is actually very good. James Redmond may have been seen as an unusual choice, as he’s been most famous for appearing in Hollyoaks and has little experience at presenting. But he’s thoroughly likeable, and has already proven to be an acceptable substitute. He’s clearly still nervous about being himself on camera, but it’s perhaps this nervousness that makes him so endearing to the audience. When he makes the odd mistake, we don’t mind, because he doesn’t come over as arrogant and false. He also sounds unlike most other presenters, having a strong (Bristol) accent which makes him feel much more real.

What’s also useful is that he’s not been placed in any situations where he has to replace Ant and Dec – there’s no Chums, no Wonkey Donkey, no Challenge James. Instead he appears in the hospital spoof Casually and the space opera SM:TV 2099, where his role as Commander Vegas is performed so well, and he’s clearly having so much fun doing it, that he can turn even the weakest line into comedic gold. It’s not worth comparing him to Ant and Dec, James is a likeable and proficient presenter in his own right, and has done enough in his first three weeks to cast off the shadow of his predecessors.

Unfortunately, James is unable to shine to his full potential as the programme’s also decided to supplement the core Cat and James duo with two other “star presenters”. Big Brother’s Brian Dowling and the unexceptional Tess Daly appear on the sofa with the two each week and join in with the regular features. This doesn’t seem to work so well – it’s fair enough having them helping out in the sketches and hanging around in the studio, but by having them co-present the programme, they sort of get in the way. Four presenters are too many, Live & Kickingproved that last year, and really James should appear more to get us used to him. It also doesn’t help that many of the links are quite short, so with four people having to get lines, it just seems crowded.

Tess isn’t much cop either, although Brian seems to be have been quite useful in interviews as he’s able to get a lot more out of the guests. Both Britney Spears this week and Tracy Shaw last week seemed to open up a lot more to Brian than they otherwise would – Shaw even chatting about her much-publicised aeroplane incident. Brian is a witty and likeable person, but it’s still far better to have two presenters and James would get my vote every time. Another problem with the series at present is the inclusion of the imported series Becoming, which consists of whiny-voiced American teenagers getting the chance to be made up as their idols. Being chopped up into three parts on SM:TV, though, it seems to be on for hours, as opposed to just one missable chunk.

Still, these problems are ironed out when CD:UK arrives at 11.30am. Cat and James front this show alone, and work well as a team. CD:UK is the best music show on television – while Top of the Pops continually attempts to convince the audience that it’s credible and exciting,CD:UK just gets on with it. The audience is genuinely excited, the presenters pitch it just right, and it tells you all you need to know about the music world. No genre seems to be promoted over another, no band seems out of place, and unlike Top of the Pops, it realises that the audience wants to hear the records, not pointless remixes or acoustic versions. It’s mainstream, professional entertainment.

So, if Brian and Tess’ roles are scaled down – and indeed Tess seemed to appear much less on this week’s programme than previous editions – and the scheduling gets slightly better, it’s not hard to see SM:TV lasting for at least another three years. And with the Beeb still in disarray, it’s hard to see anything beating this on a Saturday morning for some time yet.

In the last few years before SM:TV began in August 1998, the very mention of ITV on Saturday mornings was a joke. Programmes like It’s Not Just Saturday and Teleganticmegavision would deserve inclusion in any notional chamber of horrors, to represent the very worst of children’s television. But it’s all behind them now.

SM:TV Live is brimming over with life, a sense of enjoyment, risk-taking, humour, irreverence, and brilliance. Ant and Dec clearly enjoy what they’re doing more than any other presenters on children’s TV at the moment, and there is not a trace of the rampant consumerism and unofficial advertising for pop groups, computer games, clothes and other products that has become almost inexorably associated with CITV (and, as we’ll see later, there is a reason for this). When pop acts perform live (this week, the self-parodic Vengaboys and the awful Atomic Kitten) they aren’t presented with the usual orgy of sycophancy and reverence for these giants of pop, they’re just introduced and then they’re off as soon as the song finishes – sometimes they’re even gently sent up.

The programme plays brilliantly with clichés; the “Ant and Duck” item is a spot-on destruction of a certain type of “down on the farm” Play School feature, which could shamelessly offend all the most precious and humourless sections of its non-metropolitan audience (one of the best things about Ant and Dec is their complete lack of influence from the restricting hands of political correctness, or at least its worst excesses). The songs and mock-raps (which seem to target more artists from the ’80s than today) similarly undermine the conventions of children’s TV from within. There’s a camp parody of the tabloid phenomenon of mock-superhero righters-of-wrongs (Captain Justice – “He always disappears with a puff”), a rampant mockery of agony uncles à la Phillip Hodson on Going Live! (“Dec Says”), and the national mythical idea of What School Used to be Like (the brilliant, epic, semi-surrealistic, genuinely weird Country Dancing sketch). When this was briefly interrupted by the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK”, it was almost as if the national cultural battle of the 1970s was being replayed in the most unlikely setting imaginable. Some sketches contain an astonishing pace and diversity of references that much adult TV comedy never manages. There seems to be no assumption that “the kids” won’t “get it”, and it’s wonderful to see the Saturday morning audience being treated with such respect. Still don’t get Pokémon or Sabrina the Teenage Witch, but neither of those should be our main concerns.

CD:UK, which follows, is – as its timeslot and audience requires – based around the pop that makes it to the upper ranks of the charts, but Ant, Dec, and Cat Deeley present it with such personality and vibrancy that it’s never dull. It’s easily the best programme of its type, currently. But this is where we must descend into the abyss, because Sunday morning’s S Club TV is quite literally unwatchable. This excruciating half-hour is introduced by a staggeringly poor opening theme song, which introduces us to seven gormless, vapid, grinning, inane models who laze around a hideous all-white set. In the absence of the actual S Club 7 (who nevertheless contribute a “video diary” and have their hits played in the background) we have a Surrogate 7 presenting the show, which is part of the S Club “media franchise”. The “Pop World” feature is laughably limp, almost Chris Morris-like in its insulting progression of images to explain every word mentioned. About three seconds of an old U2 video were shown to explain who Bono was when he was mentioned, and a brief reference to Harry Potter had to be telegraphed by flashing the cover of one of the books on screen. Westlife – quintessential examples of the MOR boyband genre which SM:TV can parody effectively when it wants to – were interviewed atrociously and with great reverence, the exact inverse of Ant and Dec’s healthy puncturing of pop’s bland promotional parade.

But this was as nothing next to the vile “First Kiss” feature, where the Surrogate 7 presenters didn’t just give their audience advice on how to handle their first kisses, they positively instructed the audience exactly what to do, what to think, and what to feel. With its obsessive pushing of its viewers to miniature adulthood, its blatant sexiness, and its air of thinly-disguised propaganda for the cause of personal and physical “perfection”, this sequence was not only embarrassing, but it was truly one of the most risible things it’s possible to see on CITV. Later in the show, a lengthy plug for what we should be buying (not “might” or “could”, notice, but should) informed us of £24.99 computerised puppies, £30 “truth machines”, and clothes costing up to £140 for one jacket and pair of trousers combined. These were shamelessly hyped up, their prices flashed ostentatiously and clearly onto the screen.

Other features – “Search for the Stars”, where a 14-year-old gymnast spoke in the usual terms of her ambitions for success, and a section where you are encouraged to form with a your friends a “human S Club logo” – are dully predictable. But one feature is truly hideous – the living fashion accessories giving members of the public banners reading “WATCH S CLUB TV” on one side and, on the other side which they can’t see, “I WET THE BED”. The sniggering new Beautiful People’s laughter is then filmed for the audience’s pleasure. Public humiliation on children’s TV; how much further can the S Club franchise sink?

That is not something I would care to predict, though S Club TV is almost certainly the worst thing on children’s TV right now. SM:TV Live, on the other hand, is one of the very, very best in recent years. How long they can keep this up remains to be seen, but Ant and Dec have undoubtedly restored to Saturday morning TV a sense of event, excitement and occasion it had previously lacked for far, far too long.