I Reviewed the Only Thing Worth Reviewing at The Brit Awards: Ant and Dec's Banter

Inside the hypnotic dome of London’s The O2, an ironically airless venue situated in a part of London long since forsaken by the gods of traffic, was the 36th iteration of Britain’s premier music gala, The Brit Awards.

Once upon a time, it was tradition for the host to be James Corden – a plush toy with a microphone that squeals pure, acidic, desperate laughter every time you squeeze it. But in 2015, it was announced that Ant and Dec, Britain’s most beloved non-sexual couple, would be returning to our living rooms to take over The Brits, and I couldn’t help feeling a little warmed.

Despite the fact that the Brits are a sexless wasteland with all the diversity of a Judd Apatow movie, there was something comforting about Ant and Dec returning to the helm. There’s a nostalgia to the duo – Ant (wacky, always camera left) and Dec (giggling, always camera right) that it’s almost like they host the show every year in way, even when they’re not in the building, their auras inhabiting whoever’s in charge of the microphone like banter poltergeists. Last year, they flew through proceedings, taking selfies with Kim and bodying Paloma Faith for doing the longest speech. In a way, they kinda saved it.

In essence, they are the living manifestation of those Two Ronnies sketches that you laugh at with your dad even though they’re not actually funny. They take turns to trot through the idly naughty gags and half-corpsed segues squeezing smiles out of the audience before instantly snapping into dead-faced sincerity as it comes time to read out the voting hotline number they need to call at 50p a punt. They belong to a land of variety shows long since lost from regularly scheduled weekly programming. And compared to the fucking-and-fighting of Geordie Shore, Ex On The Beach, and its icky ilk – where glowing suburban personal trainers take turns to stove each other’s faces in for the hands of maidens heroically pissed – they are a lovely Sunday roast. Everyone needs a nice Sunday roast from time to time.

From the beginning of this year's Brits, there was lots of talk about how everyone’s taking it up a level, how everyone’s operating on another level now, how everyone’s level is gonna make this the best event ever, something to savour and tell your children about, tell their children about, about the levels. Yet, in the arid atmosphere of last night’s ceremony, their second in charge, the Geordie Lads' shtick ran dry. From the opening self-referential walk-and-talk and its back-flipping waiters to the show’s long, slow climax, barely a joke landed all night. Even the dad jokes, their stock in trade, withered and died on the vine, lost to an endless series of advert breaks and laboured links. They didn’t even garner groans; it felt like they just popped their jokes into a bottle and threw them into the void, not even leaning in to hear the smash.

Perhaps it was the vacuum of The O2 that finally conquered them. If memory serves, the venue was described by Russell Brand as “so cold it made me dinkle go all soft and scared, it did”. Yet perhaps it was the tone-deafness of the presenter choices that were to blame. Ant and Dec are lost in the Snapchat Age with its hashtags and non-binary representations of humanity, and their casual side-stepping of the night’s more controversial/important moments (Adele shouting her public support for Kesha was met with a “Uh, moving on…” spin to camera from the pair) was just a bit weird.

That’s not to say there weren’t moments, though. No more than one advert break had passed before Ant was afforded the luxury of a flamethrower: a metaphorical music industry death machine and not-that-sly dig at Kanye. “Eh, if it’s good enoof feh Kanye… Eh?” Ant says, then a second "Eh?" more pleading than the first, his weapon pissing liquid fire skyward purely to act as a set-up to Dec getting a tea-towel out to wave away the smoke that’s just set the “fire alarm” off – the punchline. It’s a moment that is at once the night’s funniest (read: “funniest” in the most shrugging voice you can, sort of like Tex Avery’s Droopy) and its most depressing: last year we had Kanye West perform a literal call-to-arms track on primetime television backed with pretty much everyone from grime and some geezers shooting fire. It felt like a little act of rebellion, as though the producers were possibly, finally “getting it”. But that was all fucked in 2016, as we had two Geordie’s in Marks and Sparks tuxes making cream-faced wallies in ballgowns go “Ooooh” for the sake of a gag about fire alarms.

Then there was the bit where designer Pam Hogg’s model mate Sadie Pinn crashed a link, draping herself over the presenters while wearing barely five percent of an outfit, finally giving stiff-shirted middle-managers something to talk about to their younger staff. “Oh, well, uh, did you see that bir– Woman? The one with the, you know… ” they’ll say, draining tar-black coffee from sloganed mugs, spilling it over their T.M. Lewin. Pinn looked amazing, terrifying, and it felt almost like a controversial “live” moment. Dec’s eyes nearly even popped out of his silly Spitting Image face as Ant got on with the important business of introducing another Jess Glynne performance. But it was all a blur really, a moment lost to media cynicism where we can’t really enjoy what’s happening because we know it must be staged, like professional wrestling at its worst. The livest thing that happened was that Adele swore loads and the poor lad on the bleeper missed a solitary “fucking” and was probably back on Production Base scouring runner jobs that pay “experience + some compensation” by morning.

And that’s the issue. Even the biggest popstar in the world, Tottenham’s Adele Adkins from Tottenham, North London, can’t say “fuck” on television at 9.20pm on a Wednesday, in front of Suki Waterhouse and a proudly-gurning Simon Le Bon. Beloved angel, Adele, with lungs like great bags of sunshine, with big hair and an infectious laugh, was so overwhelmed with excitement that she had won an award and swore like how a human might. Yet in the end, all it turned into was a few moments of bleeped out sound, concluded with stoney-faced apologies from the now serious duo Ant and Dec – who have never swore once in their bloodless, blowjobless lives.

As the night sped to its thankful close, saved only just by Rihanna and Drake and the beautiful performance of “Life On Mars” by Lorde, Ant and Dec's bumbling bad joke car chase finally reached it's whimpering close. Next January, the duo will go back to the gag-factory, the banter farm, where scores of young charges hooked up to keyboards, eyeballs pulled open like A Clockwork Orange, will filter all of the seventies variety show humour into a randomiser, making sure to nip out the bits with all the overt-racism and Jim Davidson, and write them out exactly the same script once more. Ant will take one look and pencil in a “Heh-ey!” after a gag – Ant’s patented gag signifier, an aural flag that a gag woz ‘ere – and they’ll be done.

“They’ll bloody loov it, mate! Heh-ey!,” Ant will say.

“Yeah…” Dec will reply, maybe a little wistfully, looking out at the stony faced music industry masses around him. “I mean ‘Aye’. They will ‘n’ all, like.”

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