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.

A Saturday night flop is also more excruciating for TV companies than a weeknight flop as the extended hours of entertainment on a Saturday (Saturday night entertainment starts at about 5.30pm, rather than the traditional 7pm timeslot during the week) means that the underperforming programme can be sent from a hallowed mid-evening slot to a time when the vast majority of the public are in the garden or having their tea. So Ant and Dec, having started their series six weeks before amid huge optimism at a useful 7pm slot, ended their run at that less-than-prestigious timeslot of 5.35pm, before even Catchphrase and repeats of You’ve Been Framed. You can’t have a party atmosphere at teatime. The penultimate programme even suffered the ignominy of being beaten by Friends Like These on BBC1, the programme Ant and Dec left last year to “move on” and currently doing just fine with new host Ian Wright.

So where did it all go wrong for the duo? They remained as charming and as affable as before, and they had a pretty impressive guest list – including Helen Mirren, Ricky Tomlinson, and this week Robbie Williams. But Slap Bang proved that you can’t just stick some popular personalities on a programme and expect the public to flock to their TVs – you need ideas, and these seemed to be particularly thin on the ground. So on five of the six shows we got Loose Change Lottery, where the audience put loose change in a pot before the programme, and then there was a draw when one person won the lot. But so what? Ditto Cher and Cher Alike, where a member of the audience had to guess which of three haircuts displayed belongs to Cher. This seemed to be the major attraction of the first part of the programme, even though this is the sort of stuff Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush would have used as a throwaway idea one week.

And did members of the audience really need so much airtime? Each week they seemed to have been ordered to scream and shout at everything, to make the programme seem really exciting, but this meant that everything took twice as long as it should do while the audience has hysterics. Much of the material seemed to be underwritten – weak jokes that should be part of a much better routine were treated as being on a par of the best of Fawlty Towers or Only Fools and Horses. Furthermore, this could just piss off the viewers at home – the regular “Beers” sketch, set in a spoof pub, used the same comedic style of its Saturday morning stablemate “Chums”, with outrageously bad puns and an amateurish style, which works on a low budget sketch that’s just a bit of fun, but when you’ve got a 500-strong audience roaring with laughter at it, it somehow rings hollow – they’re passing them off as real jokes on peak-time television.

There’s nothing here the duo haven’t done before, either – Challenge Ant is still fun, yes, but it had been done better on SM:TV Live. Other sketches struggled to find a consistent comedic style or tone – the “Donnelly” skit is a case in point, where Dec attempted to host a chat show while Ant interrupts. There’s very little original about this concept – seemingly it’s here so people can call them “the new Morecambe and Wise” – and also it works against the spirit of the programme, as it involved them pretending to hate each other when throughout the rest of the programme they’re best mates. Sure, it’s only supposed to be a bit of fun, but this “dumb and dumber” style of comedy is easy to write, and looks deeply contrived. Jokes about the size of Ant’s forehead are good, whereas this could be performed by any double act.

This whole “miscellany” format has never really been a big draw on a Saturday night – there needs to be a strong backbone to drag viewers back each week. Slap Bang, much like Red Alert, involved a mishmash of ideas flung together in the hope that some of them stuck, and in this case it appeared that they had little to replace any that didn’t (hence, presumably, why “Cher and Cher Alike” lasted for four weeks with what was basically one joke, and then it was replaced by exactly the same thing using Tony Blair’s hair), except for the “McPartlin Undercover” sketch that made its only appearance in this final programme. Heat magazine, promoting the series before it began, flagged this up as one of the main events in the series, but we only had one, perhaps as an indication that the others weren’t up to scratch; it’s certainly hard to see how this (hardly original) idea could have developed.

Much of the programme also seemed like Toothbrush-by-numbers; seemingly Chris Evans’ series is now the yardstick by which all these programmes must try and aim at. Here, though, this just translates into the “stupid spectacle”, so each programme ended with Ant and Dec joined on stage “just because we can” by a hundred chefs, or football mascots, who’d just dance about a bit. But who cares? This wasn’t funny, and nor did it look particularly good on screen. Each week’s programme just seemed to fizzle out; the final show had Robbie Williams performing live (live music being another aspect of the programme promised in advance and never featured until the last episode) but this was stupidly scheduled at the start of part four, rather than the exciting conclusion it could have been.

Slap Bang never plumbed the depths of the nadir of television variety, Hale and Pace’s terrible 1999 series h&p@bbc, which could leave you open-mouthed at the pointlessness of the whole thing. But too much of it seemed underwritten, underdeveloped, and lacked much of a reason for viewers to tune in. So it’s back to Saturday mornings for Ant and Dec, although given that the series was moved earlier and earlier each week, one suspects that if Slap Bang had continued they’d be back to mornings before long anyway.

Early Saturday evening television is not really territory with which I have been overly familiar of recent years, not since the demise of the classic paring of Gladiators followed by Blind Date.

However, Friends Like These fits nicely into this early evening slot, and makes pretty damn good television. It’s influences are fairly obvious, and for the most part it can fall into populist traps, which lead to entertainment by numbers. But somehow it manages still to appeal.

The basic format is quite standard and fairly uninspiring – two teams compete against each other for the chance to then try to win a holiday. Presented by the ever lovable Ant and Dec, the teams have five members each; one comprised of “the lads”, and the other “the lasses”, who are all in their late teens, with a few possibly stretching it into their 20s, lads and ladettes through and through. Ant and Dec cajole them through a series of five “challenges”, all the time building the rivalry of boys vs girls and the posturing and inanities flow free. The “challenges” look as though they are designed to be evenly distributed in terms of boy-centric and girl-centric tasks, so that it always ends up two-all. And so to the decider. Fun enough viewing, particularly the floods of mascara and the wounded male pride on show.

The winning team get the chance to play for a holiday in a slightly more devious way. Each team member qualifies by having one of their friends answer correctly a question about them. If their friend fucks up, then they have to stay behind in Grimsby or wherever. This part of the show leans strongly towards Who Wants to be a Millionaire in everything from the lighting, music (with the heartbeat running through it), and the agonised decision making.

What they don’t know is that at the end those team members who are going can gamble their holiday – if they win the whole team go, if they lose, everybody is staying at home. Knowing this as you watch it adds to the enjoyment of their misery as they get increasingly upset at being left behind, or ruining the chance of their best mate coming with them. And that is what this show is all about really, that final five – 10 minutes where they seem to go through agonies. It is a style of programming which, it is alleged, has started to proliferate, but it is compulsive to watch.

The debate about it seems to have many of the same overtones as the upset over Moment of Truth and the deleterious effect to the children in the losing families (“Won’t somebody please think of the children?!”) The issues of responsibility, blame and guilt intellectually do not sit well with light entertainment. But let’s be honest, certainly in this case, they fit very well. OK you know what buttons they are pushing, but so what? If the contestants are acquisitive enough to put themselves through the ordeal, surely that means it’s acceptable to gain vicarious pleasure from watching their misery?

So far, it has all ended well, and the teams have gambled and won. Personally, I’ll keep watching for the one where four of them get to go, and we have one team member who gets to find out who their friends really are.