Neil Patrick Harris to front US remake of Saturday Night Takeaway

Neil Patrick Harris, star of Gone Girl and Doogie Howser, MD, is to host an American remake of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, the pranks-and-sketches game show that has aired for more than 10 years in the UK.

NBC has ordered 10 episodes of the show from ITV Studios America.

The show will be filmed in front of a live studio audience, as the UK version is, hosted by Harris, who recently confirmed he will be hosting the 2015 Academy Awards.

NBC’s version will feature the original’s mix of comedy sketches, celebrity guests, pranks, musical numbers, competitions, games and hidden cameras.

However, according to New York Magazine’s Vulture, which broke the story, the Harris show will not be called Saturday Night Takeaway and will not air on Saturdays.

The UK version launched on ITV in 2002 and has been one of the broadcaster’s biggest entertainment hits of the past decade.

It follows in the long variety show tradition, which has its roots in the UK’s music hall scene and US equivalent vaudeville, and in broadcasting stretches back to the earliest days of TV in the 1940s and 1950s.

The variety format was given modern twists – including premium rate phone-in competitions – and the show’s success also relied heavily on the rapport between the studio audience, viewers and the hosts, who are regularly winners of the favourite TV presenter category at industry awards events.

NBC will be hoping to replicate that by hiring Harris, a popular and versatile actor and performer.

“As I watched the show, I couldn’t stop smiling. Now that I’ve seen many seasons, my face hurts. It’s a game changer,” Harris said in a statement. “Nothing like this has been done before, and I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and have some fun.”

Harris has been up front about his desire to host a variety show, telling radio DJ Howard Stern in May that he wanted to host a weekly variety show and had pitched an idea to CBS.

Three years ago, the actor said that he would like to do an “Ed Sullivan-y kind of show, with all the variety acts”

“As co-creators of the show, we’re hugely excited and very proud that Saturday Night Takeaway is heading to the USA,” said the show’s UK hosts Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly. “There is no one better equipped to host it there than Neil Patrick Harris and we’re looking forward to working with the team to help make Takeaway a favourite with families across America.”

In June, Harris, who also starred in hit comedy How I Met Your Mother, won a Tony Award for best actor for Broadway show Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

The UK version of the Saturday Night Takeaway was beset by scandal in 2007 when it emerged that viewers had no chance of winning some phone-in competitions, such as Jiggy Bank, unless they lived within an hour of where the production team happened to be with the model pig featured in the game that week.

Some winners of premium rate phone-in competitions were chosen based on whether they might make “entertaining” contestants, according to a scathing investigation by Deloitte.

ITV was fined ￡3m by UK media regulator Ofcom for the phone-in deception in Saturday Night Takeaway.

The show will be executive produced by McPartlin, Donnelly, Harris, Siobhan Greene, director of entertainment for ITV Studios UK, and Orly Adelson, president of ITV Studios America.

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