#but dec talking about how sad he got after getting over his initial anger

[quicklyandrogynousfox-blog]

Look, Ant and Dec are always warm, likeable and entertaining. That’s their job. But what’s most interesting about Ant & Dec’s DNA Journey is not these qualities applied to an ancestry-chasing concept. It’s the thing that happened after filming began and how they deal with it in the show. A few years ago Ant was revealed to have a serious substance-abuse problem and ended up going to rehab. The bulk of this week’s episode was filmed just before that; then production came to a halt for two years. Ten minutes before the end of this programme they explain why there’s a big time jump between episode one and next Tuesday’s episode two by addressing the issue head on. It’s quite affecting, to be honest.

Dec talks about the anger he felt at the time, and Ant talks about his sorrow for how his actions affected his friend, and they both say how much they care about each other. In fact, even before this, all the really interesting things in this show are about their immediate lives, not those of their ancestors – Dec's family connections to Tyneside Irish Centre, the fact that Ant has a troubled relationship with his absentee father, the pair of them walking their dogs.

It made me realise that what I'd really like to see is a fly-on-the-wall documentary about being Ant and Dec. I mean, forget all those olden daysers in the horrible past. What's it like to be an umbilically attached light-entertainment duo who must glide frictionlessly over the surface of life with quips and japes? What's that really like? - source