The last of the auditions

May 24th, 2009

So that’s it! The auditions are over!

The judges have chose the final 40… it’s time for the LIVE semi-finals!!

Are your favourites there? Have the judges made any mistakes? Let us know whether you think they have made they made the right decisions or not…

But, what a final set of last auditions we had! There were the Barrow Boys, who got two buzzers and then had them both removed, which is the first time that has ever happened! We had Julia Naidenko the belly dancer who had about ten yes’s, and two more from us!

We had ‘Nick Hell’, who was Hell by name and Hell by nature - let’s just say Dec didn’t warm to him , he couldn’t actually watch that one from the side of the stage; made him a bit queasy, but he definitely gave us something very different.

Kieran Gaffney, the 12 year old drummer, (who looked liked like a young Adrian Chiles! Don’t you think!?) was brilliant. He’s only been drumming for one year but he was absolutely amazing. There was Fred Bowers, the 73 year old break-dancer.  When he told us what he did, we didn’t know what he was going to break…his hips or his leg!  He got three yes’s but did have to have a little sit down afterwards to get his breath back! And how could we forget Martin Matcham, the guitarist with a fancy pants light up guitar and the mother in law from Hell who put Simon firmly in his place. All of those guys, among others, made the last audition show the best one yet.

Now though it starts to get serious. We go into the live semi-finals and we couldn’t be more excited. You already know that we love live television, and every night we’re going to get swept up in Britain’s Got Talent fever! The first live semi- final is going to be an absolute corker; here’s the line up

Diversity

Sue Son

Darth Jackson

Natalie Okri

Julia Naidenko

Nick Hell

Faces of Disco

Susan Boyle

Which two will go through? It’s hard to say. We’ll be giving you all the gossip from behind the scenes during this semi-final week so keep checking back for updates.

Also, we hope you all like the chocolate challenges, keep all your challenges coming in and we’ll give them a bash, we had a right laugh doing them and we cannot wait to show you the next one…just wait!

Until then,

Ant and Dec

 

 © 2009 Ant and Dec

The copyright in this blog is owned by Ant and Dec. If you are using a quote for publication purposes, copyright law requires you to acknowledge officialantanddec.com as the original source.

Squeaky Bum Time!

April 25th, 2009

 

Week three and the talent keeps on coming! One of our many favourites was definitely DJ Talent, the rapper who performed that catchy little number, Britain’s Got Talent!

We defy any of you who watched the show to not have the rap stuck in your heads! Remember? “When I say Britain, you say Talent… it’s Britain’s got talent its DJ Talent!” And that’s basically it. Complete with all the bling and gold teeth, in the end he went through simply because the song is so addictive it stuck in the judges’ heads! So, how many of you reading the blog now are singing the Britain’s Got Talent rap? It’s certainly a bit different from Susan Boyle!

While we’re on the subject of Susan, over 100m hits later, she’s still gracing the front page of all the papers - and what about that make-over! She’s had a trim and coloured her hair, had her eyebrows done and looks quite nice, but I have to say we loved her the way she was. Let’s hope it’s not like in the tale of Sampson and Delilah when he cuts off his hair and loses all his strength, hopefully Susan hasn’t been over blow-dried and evaporated her singing voice! Perhaps the mini-makeover is because of her impending dinner date with Piers, but we fear she’ll need a lot more than that to get through a date with him!

It looks like Flawless have competition in the form of dance group Diversity who the judges absolutely loved this week. Anyone who thought we’d found the definitive dance group for this competition is wrong as they are definitely contenders to their crown. Their style is a little different to Flawless’s but no less impressive. They’re creative, they use a few nice gimmicks (like having a very small child climb out of a hold-all!) and there are a few sound effects chucked in too. It’s going to be interesting to see if both of them, or which of them, or if either of them, go through to the live semi finals.

Speaking of the live semi’s, we’ve actually forgotten who’s made it through to the final 40 acts! Having seen so many during the auditions and interviewed just about every one of them it’s all a bit blurry! We did the deliberation days, but it was so long ago that we watch the show now and it’s still really entertaining for us, trying to decide (and remember!) who went through.

Other highlights this week included Hollie, our lovely little ballerina who has the sweetest little voice. There’s Tia-Anna, the drag artist who was allegedly unlike other drag acts because of his voice, which was his secret weapon. If that’s the case then it needs to sharpening ‘cos boy was it blunt! He thought that he’d seen us ‘drag up’ in the past and we have to admit we have, but only for televisual purposes - well, that’s what we’re telling you lot anyway…

Piers was almost directly responsible for the gruesome death of Mike, the former swimming pool manager as he performed a handstand over a knife, something you should definitely NOT try at home! He thankfully pulled it off, despite Piers buzzing at the crucial moment and Amanda freaking out. Knowing Piers, he would have timed that! The best part of that audition for us though is watching Simon almost jump out of his skin when Piers buzzes! It’s priceless! It’s our second favourite ‘Simon Moment’ of the series after his cherubic *SIGH* during Susan Boyle’s audition. He looks like a teenager in love!

Check out this week’s contestants gallery HERE.

The Prince of Darkness was on great form this week and sent us both a text to celebrate how well the show was going. He must have been on a high with the ratings and thought, “I must tell the boys how well they are doing” so when he becomes grumpy old Simon again and we’re forcing someone BACK on stage or just generally larking about, we’ll show him those texts again and remind him how fabulous he thinks we are!

Apart from BGT, there’s loads of great TV at the moment…we’re both loving Marco and Hell’s Kitchen, The Inbetweeners which is very funny, The Apprentice is riveting, we don’t have any favourites yet - it’s more about who we don’t like! James talks a bit too much and Ben seems too full of himself . We were a bit gutted when Paula went though, she was great and had nice, red hair. There’s not enough of that on TV!

We’re still catching up on Heroes and are really into Lost, they are (finally!) starting to answer some questions and tricky plot angles which is exciting. We’re also both trying season one of The Wire. The jury is out thus far but whilst we’re not really feeling it yet we’re going to stick with it; right now it feels like a joke that everyone else gets but we don’t!

We’re also in a bit of training, having had a couple of sporting challenges come our way recently. Our 5-a-side football team has been challenged to an 11-a-side game against the coaches from Brentford FC in a couple of weeks time. Brentford is our closest football league team so we’re going to give them a game. We’ve also been challenged to a round of golf against Piers Morgan and the Exec Producer of BGT, Richard Holloway. There’s money riding on it too as Piers was in the bar one night after the auditions bragging about what a great golfer he was and that he’d wipe the floor with us so and we’re going to try and fit that in the next few weeks. We’d love it if we beat him, LOVE IT!

Tomorrow night is the BAFTA Awards, so keep please everything crossed for us!

Finally, we need your help. We need you all to keep your fingers crossed Monday night, say a little prayer, light a candle, wish upon a star, whatever! It’s Newcastle Vs Portsmouth in the Premier League and we HAVE to win. We have got to win our last 3 home games before the end of the season. Bearing in mind we have only won 4 all year and there are only 3 left it doesn’t bode too well. We’ll be glued to that and we’re keeping the faith, we need everyone to rally behind the team, all the 52,000 who’ll be packed into St. James Park. We need the crowd to be the 13th man, it’s a game of two halves and if we go down we’ll be as sick as a parrot and all the other sporting clichés! Big Alan can do it…we have ultimate faith in him, it’s ‘Squeaky Bum’ time as they call it in footballing circles and we have to show bounce-back-ability! HAWAY THE LADS!!!

If you want more on BGT check out Piers Morgan’s official blog by clicking here.

 

 © 2009 Ant and Dec

The copyright in this blog is owned by Ant and Dec. If you are using a quote for publication purposes, copyright law requires you to acknowledge officialantanddec.com as the original source.

Use The Force!

April 21st, 2009

Well, Britain’s Got Talent is just getting bigger and bigger…which is great, it really seems to have caught the public’s imagination. On Saturday, just two shows in, it had its second biggest audience in BGT history (over 13 million of you tuned in!) and the whole thing has really taken us by surprise! We knew when we finished the auditions we had a good series but we had no idea people were going to engage with it as much as they have so far.  

Thanks so much for watching. It’s a real feel-good show where everyone can sit down and have a good laugh, a good cry and a good hour’s entertainment. And wasn’t there plenty to laugh and cry about this week!? Darth Jackson was obviously our favourite. What you couldn’t quite see on TV was how much he was sweating! It was literally dripping out of the bottom of his mask! At the end of his act, for some unknown reason, he looked really annoyed with us, like we’d messed the whole thing up for him, which we couldn’t understand because he didn’t ask us to do anything for him! He never asked us to change his music halfway through or stop at a particular moment, so when things didn’t go to plan in his head, he wasn’t too pleased and targeted his displeasure at us. Ant did try and nick his light sabre though so that probably rubbed him up the wrong way! And let me tell you the sight of Darth Vader on stage not very pleased, hands on hips, staring menacingly back at you is a pretty harrowing sight!

Shaheen was a great little singer but it nearly all went terribly wrong. We were hoping and expecting him to be brilliant when he first started  singing Valerie, unfortunately it just didn’t quite work for some reason.  Thankfully Simon stopped him during the song which shows that he occasionally gets it right (ok, ok, he gets it right a lot of the time!) It was completely the wrong song but then what followed was knockout! The majority of the singers prepare a couple of songs in case there are any problems on the day and thank goodness Shaheen did, he was dynamite and has predictably been installed as second favourite to win the show after Susan, but as we keep saying, there are plenty more to come….

This week it’s BOOK BOOK BOOK for us- we’ve received the finished first draft of the manuscript and we’re putting the finishing touches to it and, so we’re turning off phones, computers and locking ourselves away to get it done. It’s weird sitting down and reading through the last 20 years, but we think you’re all going to really enjoy it. We hope you do anyway!! It looks like it’s going be out in September so keep checking back for a release date, we’ll let you know here as soon as it’s confirmed.

We also launched our YouTube channel this week too, please feel free to drop in for a cuppa HERE , we’ve just moved in so you’ll have to excuse the mess, everything’s in boxes, and we cant find the tea bags anywhere so it’ll have to be coffee is that alright!?

Oh, and before we go we’d like to say a big “thank you” to some of the new visitors to the site from around the World who’ve been visiting as well as you guys here in the UK. We’ve been reading your comments so keep leaving them; it’s great to know there are so many of you out there enjoying the show from such far flung corners of the globe!

Don’t forget to check out our behind-the-scenes webisodes!

Enjoy Show 3 on Saturday, catch you later  X

 

 

 

 © 2009 Ant and Dec

The copyright in this blog is owned by Ant and Dec. If you are using a quote for publication purposes, copyright law requires you to acknowledge officialantanddec.com as the original source.

Ant & Dec on the Susan Effect

April 17th, 2009

Susan’s Got Talent

April 16th, 2009

This time last week none of us had heard of Susan Boyle, a church worker from West Lothian in Scotland, but that has all changed thanks to Britain’s Got Talent.

After just one week of the show Susan has become a world-wide phenomenon despite the fact that Britain’s Got Talent isn’t even shown outside of the UK! In fact, Susan has become such a big star that a video of her startling performance on Saturday’s show has now had over 11 MILLION views on YouTube! Not bad for the woman everyone doubted when she declared she wanted to be a singer up there with the likes of West End veteran Elaine Paige - proving you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

Susan’s star is rising so quickly that not only is she grabbing headlines this side of the pond, but she’s creating a massive buzz in America too. She was featured on America’s NBC Today Show , moving the host  to tears and the Washington Post published a long article on her yesterday. Even Hollywood stars Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore have been touched by the ‘Boyle Effect’, posting links on their Twitter pages to the video of Susan singing.

See Ant & Dec’s view on this week’s crazy events in our exclusive video HERE.

There you have it! We’ll keep you posted as the story develops, but in the meantime visit the official Britain’s Got Talent site HERE to watch Susan’s amazing, tear-jerking performance once more.

Britain’s Got Talent Week 1

April 14th, 2009

So, this weekend saw the return of Britain’s Got Talent, and what a phenomenal first show it was! If you were one of the millions who tuned in, what did you think of some of the first few acts to hit our screens?

Father and son Greek dancing duo Stavros Flatley had us and we’re guessing the whole country in stitches with their hilarious take on Riverdance - we certainly weren’t expecting their comedy routine and it definitely had the desired effect on the judges who put them through to the next round. We can’t wait to see what they’ll do next!

Other highlights for us included Flawless whose dancing skills were just that, and Susan Boyle who literally blew EVERYONE away with her beautiful singing voice, and even nearly reduced Amanda to tears! And then there were the not so good acts… the Ferraro Rocher man only managed a paltry four chocolates but our very own Ant scoffed five! How many do you reckon you could put away in a minute?

Leave us a comment and let us know who your faves are now!