Popular Geordie duo Ant and Dec are set to discover that becoming movie stars is harder than doing a Bushtucker Trial on the ITV show they're so good at presenting, I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

It's difficult enough for one TV entertainer to transfer their small screen magic to the big screen. Far from halving the risk of such a move, being a double act increases the danger.

Finding the right script that not only plays to their talents but also gives them equal roles is one of the most difficult things to do. Ant and Dec reckon they've done it with Alien Autopsy. They will play best friends - not much of a stretch there - who claim to have made a video of a post mortem on an alien. Filming on the £10m movie is scheduled to start soon.

The pair have acted together before, as youngsters on BBC1's junior soap Byker Grove, and they performed as musical double act PJ and Duncan. Their movie experience is confined to playing themselves in Richard Curtis's romantic comedy Love Actually, which produced a memorable "Which one is Ant? Which one is Dec?" quip from Bill Nighy's character.

They've obviously harboured ambitions to be more than cheeky TV presenters for some time. Why else would they take on the roles of Terry and Bob in a one-off TV remake of The Likely Lads on ITV a couple of years ago? It was only moderately well-received and a series never happened.

Alien Autopsy is an even trickier proposition. If they get it right, the rewards could be international fame and fortune. If they get it wrong, they can always go back and do more Ant And Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway.

Double acts have tried - and failed - before to match their TV success in the cinema. Morecambe and Wise kept trying, despite poor reaction, with three movies during the 1960s.

Eric and Ernie played spies in The Intelligence Men, prompting one critic to note this was an "inept and rather embarrassing big screen debut for two excellent television comedians". Undeterred, they followed that as tourists mixed up with jewel thieves in That Riviera Touch. Finally, in The Magnificent Two, the pair found themselves in the middle of a Latin American revolution. The response from audiences was far from magnificent.

The films weren't bad but failed to capture what made the pair special on the box. Robbed of a live audience and forced to play characters in a narrative, they just weren't as funny. Even having their TV scriptwriters, Sid Green and Dick Hills, penning the movies didn't help.

"The pair's relaxed, intimate style might have been perfect for the sketch format of their TV show, but it was totally wrong for sustaining narratives," suggested one reviewer.

Another double act, Cannon and Ball, fared even worse with The Boys In Blue, a 1983 comedy in which they played policemen on the trail of art thieves. It's surprising they weren't locked up for making the film after being described as "a totally untalented star team" on the basis of the evidence on screen.

That was one of the kinder reviews. Another suggested it was a serious contender for the title of worst British film ever made.

Perhaps Little and Large took the hint, as they've never tried for film fame. Neither have Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, who've been content to spoof movies in their TV show rather than appear in the real thing.

Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones carried over their Not The Nine O'Clock News and Alas Smith And Jones partnership into several pictures. They also wrote Morons From Outer Space, which received little praise despite teaming them with Jimmy Nail and Get Carter director Mike Hodges. The end result, someone thought, "wouldn't have made the grade during the Oxbridge duo's student rag week".

They tried again, with little more success, in the film of Tom Sharpe's bawdy comic novel Wilt, before deciding to call it a day together on screen. Smith went on to find success in movies on his own, but as a director who counts The Tall Guy and Bean among his hits.

To their credit, Ant and Dec have taken their time in finding what they regard as the right project to launch them on a movie-going audience. The key is to find roles that trade on their TV persona and aren't wildly different from the image that made them popular. No playing serial killers or drug addicts on their first cinema trip.

There was one double act that moved the other way from big to small screen. Vaudeville comedians Abbot and Costello were US film studio Universal's top stars of the early 1940s. They then tried TV in 1953 with a series that recycled their old routines. Shortly after that, the duo split up and retired.

Published: 14/05/2005