The cult of Ant & Dec

On Saturday night Ant & Dec resurrected their old PJ and Duncan guise to perform their 1994 No.9 hit Let's Get Ready To Rhumble on their hugely popular Saturday Night Takeaway show. Three days later and the song is pulling away from the competition on iTunes and looking quite likely to give the duo their first ever UK No.1 single, or at least their second top three hit!

2013 has proved to be the year of the pop reunion, with ITV2's The Big Reunion reuniting Liberty X, B*Witched, 911, Honeyz, Blue, Atomic Kitten and 5ive. The latter three acts appeared as part of a medley on Saturday Night Takeaway and this clearly spurred on the boys to take part in their own reunion! This isn't the first time that the boys resurrected their act, they did the same on CD:UK's 100th show in the early 00s. This of course predated iTunes and with no CD single available to buy and a far smaller audience, it had no impact whatsoever on the charts. Fast forward to 2013 and the instant gratification available to eager music downloaders and the song has found itself more in favour than it ever has been before, selling 35,000 copies in two days alone according to the Official Charts Company! The Saturday night performance of the song was even more impressive considering that they got back into their old PJ and Duncan gear, complete with baseball caps and tracksuits!

Ant & Dec first met on the set of northern teen drama Byker Grove where they played the characters PJ and Duncan and quickly became best friends. They had a successful music career in the 1990s, Let's Get Ready To Rhumble becoming the first of eight consecutive top 20 hits under that name before they switched to their more famous moniker of Ant & Dec to score another four top 20 smashes including the excellent late November 1996 hit, When I Fall In Love, complete with Ant's famous rapping and Dec's dulcet tones. 

The duo then moved on to front ITV's new Saturday morning children's show SM:TV and it's musical sister show CD:UK, with Cat Deeley. Their popularity skyrocketed from there and they have been Britain's most famous presenting duo ever since, winning awards left, right and centre for their work on shows such as I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Britain's Got Talent, Pop Idol and Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway. They returned to music in 2002 to record the official World Cup song for England, We're On The Ball, which peaked at No.3 in the charts. But 11 years on from that and 19 years on from the original release of Let's Get Ready To Rhumble, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly may just follow the Saturdays a week earlier in achieveing something that had so far always eluded them, a No.1 single in the UK! Watch them wreck the mike...psyche!