Ant & Dec

Ant & Dec is the collective professional name for the entertainment act of Declan Donnelly and Anthony McPartlin. Throughout the 2000s they had a highly-rated Saturday-night ITV show, called Saturday Night Takeaway. It was the initial competition for the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who when it returned to the network in 2005. An early sign of the strength of the revitalised Doctor Who was that it trounced Ant & Dec in the ratings, breaking the three-year hold that they had on Saturday night audiences.

Years later, they were involved in the National Television Awards Sketch 2011.

NTA sketch

In the sketch, Ant & Dec knew the Eleventh Doctor. Ant and Dec had been bound in invisible space handcuffs and needed the Doctor to release them. Dermot O'Leary told them that the Doctor was a little too busy to free them.

Like other celebrities in the tongue-in-cheek sketch, it's difficult to say that Ant & Dec are actually a part of the DWU. However, the precise nature of their appearance — and the fact that the Doctor won't free them — can be read as a metaphor for for the fact that 'Doctor Who had effectively "shackled" Ant & Dec by displacing them from the top of the Saturday night ratings heap.