This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly, better known as Ant & Dec, first appeared on British screens together in the early 90s, which is also when this reviewer first appeared in the world. Ant & Dec have been a part of British culture all my life, then — integral to my understanding of the universe — and yet when I tried to explain them for this review I was stumped.
Who are Ant & Dec? Or, rather, what is Ant & Dec? What is the purpose of Ant & Dec? What is the meaning of Ant & Dec?
What is my purpose? What is the meaning of life?
Ant & Dec are TV presenters (known for hosting I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and Britain’s Got Talent amongst many, many more) but they have also acted, sung and released a book together.
For 25 years, they have been titans of popular culture — perennially grinning, joking and bantering. Their partnership is close enough that they might as well be Siamese twins. They have been ubiquitous enough that they might as well have been sleeping upside down in a closet in a production studio.
Yet if you had asked me to say three things about the men that did not include their names, their physical appearance and their job description, I would have been lost. This is not a criticism. This is how it used to be. No one had to know about the “real” lives and personalities of famous people. It was enough to have two cheerful Geordies cracking jokes before introducing a hapless wannabe singer to be torn to shreds by Simon Cowell for no good reason, or a failed politician eating a wombat’s testicles.
Now, though, we need more. The rise of the tabloid press fuelled our interest in their private lives — in their affairs, and their addictions, and their crimes. The rise of pop psychology and long-form interviewing, meanwhile, has fuelled our interest in their emotional lives — in the reasons for the affairs, the addictions and the crimes. (This is obviously far less invasive and far more mature.)
We want to know what celebrities are really like — about their opinions, and their struggles, and their fears. So, I was not surprised to see that Ant & Dec have a podcast — Hanging Out With Ant & Dec.
It isn’t just that we want famous people to be more open nowadays — we also want to judge their every failing like 15th century inquisitors. This is a neat trick. Judges might call it entrapment.
Immediately, Ant & Dec — the most inoffensive duo around — veered unsuspectingly into an outrage culture swamp when promo materials for the podcast, featuring the pair hanging from a washing line, made it look as if they were alluding to suicide. (I presume a lot of people found this funnier than they found it offensive but it kept the Daily Mail busy.)
Amid this culture of divulgence and denunciation, Ant & Dec … remain almost heroically bland. Hanging Out With Ant & Dec is, its blurb claims, “the podcast where two best mates, with very busy lives, get to just hang out together” — and, yes, that’s pretty much all this is.
We get self-deprecation of the “what are we like?” variety, and gentle mockery of the “what are you like?” variety, and absolutely no introspection of the “why is anything like this?” variety.
There is an occasional glimpse into the unseen lives of the duo. Ant references being sober. Dec mentions unimpressed audiences throwing ashtrays at the pair when they were in their ill-conceived musical phase. Giggling drowns out these poignant hints towards emotional and psychological depth, and the podcast breezes on.
“You’ve got a massive fear of failure,” a psychic tells Ant in a bonus episode, “which is never going to happen.” “I don’t know that,” says Ant. “You do,” the psychic reassures him. You do, Ant! You do! Don’t doubt yourself! Remember who you are!
“Ant & Dec’s Biggest Fall-Out” is the title of one episode. My God! What kind of vicious feud could this have been? They argued about a board game. “We’ve never played it since,” Dec muses.
Such trauma! How can these men even be in the same room as each other? In a later episode, Dec reveals a “shocking revelation” about Ant. He once urinated in a glass because there was no toilet. Scandalous. Someone arrest this man!
I call this commitment to superficial banter “heroic” because, as much as I found the podcast brain-rottingly tedious, I couldn’t help respecting the duo for understanding their place in the world.
Of course Ant & Dec have more complex lives beyond the screen, but they also know they are not pundits, poets or public intellectuals. They are presenters, and they are transparent about their work being a presentation of the truth rather than the whole truth.
There is nothing fundamentally honest about being “open”, inasmuch as it can be partial, and inasmuch as what one’s openness exposes can be artificial. Many a celebrity interview has “depth” in the sense that an overflowing landfill has depth.
Knowing this, Ant & Dec’s clear separation between their private and public selves is faintly refreshing — and a sad, simple message of thanks from Ant in response to well wishes following the recent death of his dog was quite moving in its rare solemn sincerity. “I think it’s time to take a pause,” says Dec, before an advert for Santander.
