The Jiggy Bank was comfortably the dullest and most boring part of Takeaway every time it appeared. As you’ll be aware, the “game”, such as it was, involved members of the public straddling the giant pig to dislodge cash. This may have been fun if you were there riding it, but it never once worked as a piece of television – you could never work out how much the thing worked and how much cash they were making. I was always amazed it lasted as long as it did, as it was such a hopeless item.

The biggest surprise, though, is that callers on the Grab the Ads phone-in were being vetted beforehand to judge their suitability to appear on air. I’m amazed by this, as the public’s contribution to this “game”, which invariably lasted about thirty seconds as it was always overruninng, consisted of nothing but them screaming “Hellloooooooo!” when they were put on air and “Hooraaaaay!” when they were given their prize. Most of the callers were completely indescipherable. Indeed, a few series back when the show was pre-recorded because of that strike at LWT, they played Grab the Ads without callers – winners’ names were just flashed on screen – and it made absolutely no difference to the feature whatsoever. What on earth was the point of fixing it?

Indeed, the awful thing about these problems is that in every case, the phone-in aspect made no difference to the quality of the show and, in most cases, was in fact the most boring aspect. The Gameshow Marathon was a lovely piece of warm-hearted nostalgia, only spoilt by the amount of time they kept on demanding we call in.

I’m not blaming Ant and Dec for any of this. Sure, they were billed as Executive Producers, but there’s such a thing as delegation. I would question whether the Editors of the newspapers printing such suggestions know much about their papers’ distribution methods or how their switchboard operates. They have trust in those who are responsible for it.

The worst thing about all this is that, unlike most of the other issues at the Beeb when they were often ham-fisted attempts to solve problems, these scandals have come about purely due to cynicism and greed. And that’s a real shame.

The first series of Saturday Night Takeaway, screened last summer, was a likeable if fairly slight LE show. Yeah, alright, it was Toothbrush-by-numbers, but at least it was better than the boys’ first venture into prime time, Slap Bang. There was some nice banter between the pair, some amusing items and a decent finale with huge prizes being given away. Yet it never really felt like something that would get the nation staying in on a Saturday night. You didn’t really feel as if you were missing anything if you decided to go out instead and, unlike the early days of Noel’s House Party or Gladiators, it was hardly the talk of the office the following Monday.

Chris Evans’ agent Matthew Freud is quoted (in “The Nation’s Favourite”, Simon Garfield’s book on Radio One) as explaining the thinking behind Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. He says that after each show, they wouldn’t just ask “Was it a great show?”, but also “Are there two or three items that people will be talking about?” The idea is that rather than having to spend loads of money on promotion, if you have these items then people will tell their friends about it the next day, and those friends will perhaps watch the next week, and so on. It looks like the producers of Takeaway have been paying attention, as judging by the current series they’re trying incredibly hard to get these watercooler moments into the show.

For the most part, it’s working out. The best idea they’ve had is to increase the number of pre-recorded items in the programme. The problem with trying to engineer watercooler moments on a live show is that they can often fall flat and not work out on the night. With a pre-recorded item they can simply junk them if they don’t work, or edit them to make them a bit sharper and funnier. It may lose a bit of the immediacy and the idea that things can go wrong at any moment, but it increases the professionalism and the quality of the finished product.

In the new series, there are two main self-contained strands. So far, the most successful has been the “Little Ant and Little Dec” sketches. The concept is that Ant and Dec can’t be bothered to do most of the stuff they’re asked to do, so they’ve hired two young kids to fill in for them. This works because the two kids are great in the sketches, especially this week when they went out with Ant and Dec’s girlfriends for them. The writing is strong and they make for amusing, amiable viewing. The in-studio banter between Ant and Dec and their protégés is also fresh and uncontrived, and shows why Big Ant and Dec are such great presenters.

The other insert is Ant and Dec Undercover, which is a little more variable. Each week Ant and Dec are made-up – with some very impressive prosthetics – and then cause chaos in a different situation. The first sketch wasn’t that exciting, with the two dressing up as German popstars and appearing on This Morning, as it seemed that they didn’t really know what to do with the disguise, and the sketch just seemed to drag. The second outing saw them carry out a fake job interview with a member of the public, and it was certainly funnier, but the problem was that it could really have been on any programme. Yes, it was Ant and Dec under the latex, but apart from that it was identical to umpteen episodes of Beadle’s About. It’s perhaps also unfortunate that The Richard Taylor Interviews began on Channel 4 a few days before, which shares a very similar concept. It needs to be a bit more unique to really stand out. The forthcoming Simon Cowell “hit” should show the potential of the feature (incidentally, it was a bit cheeky to promote that heavily before the first show, and then hold it back, clearly to keep people watching).

The vast majority of Takeaway remains live and studio-based, though, and the “Grab the Ads” game is still one of the major items. They’ve managed to address one of the failings from the last series, in that now we’re actually able to see the prizes that the contestants are going to win. Last time round, they obviously had to avoid mentioning brand names, but this meant that while the contestants were told they’d won a car, we couldn’t see them actually get it, so it all fell a bit flat. However one of the other flaws actually seems to have been emphasized this time round. In the previous run, the game ran throughout the show, narrowing down the contestants from three to one before the final. Now just one person is plucked out of the audience and plays the final, but this means that you hardly know anything about them, and so when they win you just go “So what?” Both shows so far in this run have seen the contestants win the lot, but in both cases they’ve simply guessed the answer to the final question and it doesn’t really feel like they’ve deserved it. The game really needs to be a bit harder, or we need to know more about the contestants, because at the moment it’s hard to get excited over it. The same goes for the viewers’ phone-in game, where all we know is the caller’s name.

A lot of the show still feels a little contrived, with clunky edits and unspontaneous “spontaneity”. Maybe this is a case of trying too hard, and it will become better the longer it runs and the more everyone relaxes. Presumably it is going to be a long run, though, given the lack of any other ideas at the moment. It’s fortunate that Ant and Dec are still two of the most likeable people on telly, and so I don’t mind if it carries on. If only because it seems to be one of the few shows at the moment not presented by Davina McCall.

Slap Bang was supposed to be the show that would transplant their Saturday morning supremacy into the evening, but somewhere along the line they forgot to think of anything to do when they were there. We were seemingly supposed to watch purely because they were Ant and Dec and they were popular – almost putting faith in the idea that we’d watch our favourites reading the phone book. All the good ideas had previously appeared on SM:TV, and the only innovation was performing them in front of a constantly screaming, shouting audience, which was just annoying – the weak material was treated as comedic gold. Yet seemingly nobody was prepared to slag it off, critics simply suggesting “Well, it’s not quite there, but Ant and Dec are still really good.”

So here we are 12 months later, and it’s time for the boys’ next attempt at capturing that big mainstream audience. Of course it’s important for ITV that they’re successful, partly because they’ve signed them up on expensive contracts and partly because they want a new hit show to ease the pressure on Blind Date and Stars in Their Eyes, both of which are playing to reliable but declining audiences, and will remain in the schedules until something better comes along. Saturday Night Takeaway shares some similarities with the earlier Slap Bang – it’s in the same slot, it’s live, and it too has an irritatingly large studio audience. It differs, though, in that it’s made by a different production team and it has – at last! – a reason to watch. So you’ve got various quickie games, a musical guest, and a central game which runs throughout the show and ends up with a big climax at the end where a contestant wins a huge prize. With Slap Bang most of the items didn’t really have much of a point, while here there are prizes on offer, and that makes a big difference.

Of course the major selling point in this series is that a member of the audience gets to win whatever was advertised during the commercial breaks in one programme shown on ITV1 that week. This isn’t really as revolutionary a concept as it first sounds, though. There’s no actual way of knowing if they are actually the products from the adverts, unless you’ve got a tape of the programme to check. Basically it means that at the end of it you get a list of 25 prizes, some good, some crap, and the point of the end game is to try and find the good ones and avoid the rubbish ones. Indeed, it could be argued that the conceit here is detrimental to the tension – this week’s winner got a car, but because they can’t mention brand names they couldn’t show him what car he’d actually won – or any of the other prizes. Despite this constraint, it’s hard to see how it could be altered without contravening broadcasting regulations.

Thankfully some of the other games make up for it. At one point they go live to a cinema and tell the people inside it that one of them has £3000 at their home, but they’ve got to go home and collect it before the end of the show. A bit like Noel’s House Party? Maybe, but it’s well executed, even if the ending seemed ever so slightly staged. Though what happens if the lucky punter refuses to go home is anyone’s guess.

The other standout feature is the item where someone is locked in a bunker for a week with Jeremy Beadle. It’s not brilliantly explained – has Jeremy really agreed to live there for six weeks, and if so, why? – but it’s diverting enough, as every week Jeremy and the punter have to master a particular task and then perform it on the show. This week they were asked to learn and then perform the Chinese national anthem, and if they got it right, the punter left the bunker and got a cash prize, and Jeremy got something to make his spell in the bunker a bit nicer. This is hugely refreshing because the programme refuses to do predictable “Jeremy Beadle is a complete wanker” jokes; instead he genuinely wants the contestants to win, and the contestants genuinely say how much they’ve enjoyed the week with him. It’s hard to say why this works and the similar Moment of Truth doesn’t, but it does. And Jeremy does come over as a really likeable person.

Some other bits work, and some don’t. On a personal note I’d like to take issue with them announcing a “newsflash” midway through the programme, because it had me fooled for a few seconds before I realised it was a spoof. A vaguely subversive and clever idea, yes, but at a time like this I’d rather we didn’t have jokes like that, please. Also, much as I have a soft spot for what one LWT staffer once memorably referred to as “big fuck off LE bollocks”, we don’t need huge hyper audiences screaming and shouting at everything on the show. Laughter and applause is one thing, acting as if The Second Coming is taking place on stage is another.

So, the future of light entertainment? Well, on the other side at the same time is the overcomplicated and stagey lottery quiz, In It To Win It, and it’s better than that. It’s also better than The Vault, which is on before it, and it’s better than the increasingly predictable Blind Date, which it replaces. So in those terms, it’s a success. It’s not going to get you to stay in on a Saturday night, but if you’re in front of the telly at that time, it’s worth a look. It’s clearly better than Slap Bang because, as Dec noticed, it’s actually got a point to it. So I wouldn’t mind if it ran and ran. But if I get a better offer, I probably won’t be putting the tape on.