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Ant And Dec Prank Bradley Walsh In Hilarious Saturday Night Takeaway Stunt

Ant And Dec Prank Bradley Walsh In Hilarious Saturday Night Takeaway Stunt

The duo took over the filming of The Chase, which Walsh hosts, creating all kinds of havoc on set

Jess Hardiman

Jess Hardiman

There's a lot of glum news doing the rounds at the moment, meaning any light relief is much appreciated. Enter Ant and Dec, who have pulled off a rather brilliant stunt on the unassuming Bradley Walsh as part of last night's Saturday Night Takeaway.

The duo had previously pranked Walsh as part of another stunt - something that did not go down all too well with the TV presenter, who ended up storming off and vowing he'd never let them do that to him again.

Unfortunately for Walsh, Ant and Dec had other ideas, having managed to rope in the entire team behind his TV game show The Chase to help them with round two.

They decided to make mischief during the filming of a completely set-up episode of The Chase, which saw actors brought in as contestants to wreak havoc on set, each wearing an earpiece so that Ant and Dec could feed them lines.

Ant and Dec were feeding answers through to contestants.
ITV

Throughout the filming, the Saturday Night Takeaway hosts arranged a series of mishaps, from Chaser Jenny Ryan mucking up her lines through to the bin men noisily taking the rubbish out in the middle of play.

ITV

They even rigged the entire game, but Walsh only became suspicious of an elderly contestant, rather than becoming wise to any sign of wider foul play.

"Is she scamming us?" he asked crew angrily backstage.

Eventually, things wrapped up when a huge technical fault saw the set explode, prompting Ant and Dec - dressed up as fireman - rush in for the big reveal.

ITV

And last night's Saturday Night Takeaway seemed to do the trick with entertaining the nation, with ITV announcing the show had its biggest ever audience, with an average viewership of 9.5m viewers, and almost half of all TV viewers (45 percent).

With social distancing measures in place due to the coronavirus outbreak, there was no studio audience for yesterday's programme, but that didn't stop the show being an all-out hit, becoming the biggest overnight audience on any channel so far in 2020.

ITV said its peak of 11.1m was the highest on any channel since the fireworks on BBC One on New Year's Eve 2019.

An ITV press release said: "It was up on the series average by +2.7m viewers (+39%) and +7 share points.

"It was the most watched programme of 2020 so far by young people with an average audience of 1.6m - almost two thirds [60 per cent] of 16-34 year-old watching TV last night - tuning in for the show.

"This represented an increase on the series average for that age group of +0.5m viewers (+45%) and +9 share points. "

Featured Image Credit: ITV

Topics: Entertainment, TV and Film, bradley walsh, UK Entertainment, Ant and Dec