Ant and Dec say Simon Cowell Saturday Night Takeaway prank was 'payback'

Watch Ant and Dec say Simon Cowell Saturday Night Takeaway prank was 'payback'

What did you miss?

Ant and Dec have joked that pranking Simon Cowell on Saturday Night Takeaway was “payback” for all the times he’s kept them waiting on Britain’s Got Talent.

The presenters target Cowell in their show’s Undercover segment, which sees them playing tricks on fellow celebs. They get pretend police officers to pull him over while he’s cycling in Malibu and later pull a prank that sees him locked in a box on stage on TV show America’s Got Talent.

Speaking on This Morning, the duo revealed it was a full circle moment as Cowell was the victim of their first ever Undercover.

What, how, and why?

A clip of the new prank showed Cowell on stage with a magician who had the key to unlock the TV mogul, However, he appeared to swallow it then wandered off, leaving the star looking confused.

“Hello? Hello? Anyone?” Cowell calls, before being told there was a technical problem. "Oh great," he muttered.

Laughing, Dec said: "Oh he is in there for about half an hour.” “He is in there for ages!” giggled Ant. “There’s a full audience in the studio, he’s in there for half an hour,” said Dec.

Ant chuckled: “If you think of all the time we have waited for him on Britain’s Got Talent… ‘Shall we get him out?’ ‘No, leave him, leave him in there, leave him for longer’… this is payback!”

What else happened?

The new series of Saturday Night Takeaway will be the last for a bit, as Ant and Dec announced last year that they would be resting it after 20 series.

They told This Morning hosts Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary that it felt like "the right time" and that their wives would like them home.

“It feels like the right time, feels like a natural time to give the show a rest,” said Dec. “We did it once in 2009, we gave the show a bit of a rest, and we reimagined the show, we brought it back bigger and better, and that’s what we are thinking this time."

“It’s a year long thing for us… it’s really tiring and we've got a lot of other stuff on and our wives want us home for a little bit," added the star, who has been married to wife Ali since 2015.

Ant - who tied the knot with wife Anne-Marie Corbett in 2021 - promised: “We are going to go out with a bang. We are going to go out on a high.”

Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway is back this weekend on Saturday 24 February at 7pm on ITV1, STV, STV Player & ITVX.

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