More Than a Year Later (After I Wrote About It Last) Ant and Dec and Wanna Bet? Debut on ABC

Hey, British television community, we only have to contend with one Ryan Seacrest. You have two. What's that like? Twice the gay jokes? Twice the short jokes? Do they produce bad unscripted shows for you digital stations, too?

It's so typical that we would have one person doing the same job that two do in the UK, isn't it? Us Yanks with our work ethic and, I've always suspected in Seacrest's case, our desire not to split the check in half.

So, those guys above are Ant and Dec, as I said more than a year ago in this post, and the show is based on a German format called Wetten Das? (which does translate into Wanna Bet? in some idiomatic way) and without much fanfare at all, including no mention in the trades as of late, the show is hitting ABC tomorrow night.

And the LA Times' Scott Collins wrote about the show and talked to the hosts for this piece in today's paper:

It may be hard for Americans to understand how huge Ant & Dec are in Britain, because despite their broad exposure on the U.K. version of " American Idol," they're still pretty close to totally unknown here. Spending an hour or so with them on the sunny pool deck of their West Hollywood hotel, as I did last week, meant being disturbed by not even one fan or industry well-wisher. So imagine Ryan Seacrest, if he were two people, spoke with the "Geordie" accent of northern England and was even more ubiquitous than he already is.

I wrote my first four graphs without even reading Scott's piece, he said the same thing in one. Newspapers have page limits, the web doesn't (in other words, sod off!, I can write concisely if I want, I don't have to).

ABC's page for the show is at this link, and they keep describing the show in the clips there as ordinary people who can do extraordinary things. There's a guy this week who claims that he can identify the artist on a compact disc just by licking it. The CD. Licking it. I know.

So, the celeb panel makes a wager on whether or not the contestant can actually perform the task, and then someone wins or loses and their favorite charity gets a check, somehow, I dunno.

Wait, ABC describes it like so:

Wanna Bet? is a weekly, one-hour primetime event in which celebrities wager on challenge-performing contestants. The celebrities judge the performers and have the chance to earn big money for the charity of their choice by betting on the success or failure of the wildest tricks and mental challenges that ordinary Americans -- housewives, truck drivers, dentists -- can dream up and perform in front of a studio audience.

So there you go. Honestly, I thought there was more to it a year ago when I first wrote about it. I thought  that with the celeb panel there was an interivew portion of the show and maybe a performance from a singer or band at some point. Maybe there is. Maybe I just don't know about it.

Maybe it someone from ABC would ever return my emails I wouldn't have to depend on scurrilous web posts for info.

And while I'm at it, ABC, it's just rude and ridonkulous to put a 15 second pre-roll ad in front of a show promo, which is already an ad.

Stop it!