The 90s are back – again. Like a particularly aggressive PPI caller, they keep interrupting our day. But instead of an automated voice saying, creepily, “we have been trying to reach you”, they instead opt for the simpler: “Wahey!”
Channel 4 has announced that TFI Friday will return for a whole new series hosted by Chris Evans after 3.7 million viewers tuned in for the soon-to-be Top Gear host’s one-off special earlier this month, with millions more watching online. It’s the icing on the cake of a revolving 90s revival that was arguably started by Blur reforming in 2009, staying together and releasing a new album this year, and which seems to have reached a peak with the forthcoming return of The Crystal Maze as a live immersive experience, complete with the surreal input of Richard O’Brien.
And what’s wrong with that, you might ask. The 90s were a good time to be alive in the UK. We had jungle music, footballers you felt you could be mates with, a more buoyant economy, and Islamic fundamentalism was only something that Salman Rushdie had to worry about.
And who embodies the 90s better than Evans? From The Big Breakfast, which helped us of the then teenage generation to acquire an ability to invent excuses as to why we were late for school, through to TFI via Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, I adored everything he did. The tone of his shows somehow summed up the collected media spectacle of the time: a continuum from Gazza’s dentist’s chair celebration at Euro 96, Blur v Oasis and Jarvis waving his arse at Michael Jackson. They made you feel part of the club.
But in hindsight, TFI Friday might have been the place that Britpop came to die. The show was already a rehash of media shorthand and tropes from further back, owing much to The Word and with a theme song nicked from a 1960s TV show and its roster of bands such as Ocean Colour Scene and Kula Shaker in thrall to the same decade.
A cursory listen to the soundtrack to the comeback, TFI Friday: The Album, which went to number one in the iTunes chart following the live show, suggests what this is really about: an exercise in extracting more readies from £50 man. We’re already living through a deeply conservative cultural moment, and dad rock fronted by the new presenter of Top Gear tips the balance even further.
The items on the show such as What Does the Fat Bloke Do? and Freak or Unique, and the character of Will “Weeeeeeeeeell” Macdonald, Evans’s put-upon sidekick producer, now seem like precursors to Ricky Gervais’s artless bullying of Karl Pilkington. It is also reminiscent of Chris Moyles’s more acerbic radio persona (Evans’s production company UMTV was the brains behind Channel Five’s unsuccessful Live with Chris Moyles). In our brave new world of cheeky Nando’s, where life often feels like an unwanted episode of TFI Friday, it’s arguable whether Evans can sustain eight episodes as a ringleader of this particular brand of refried bantz without it feeling entirely irrelevant.
On paper, Geri Halliwell and Kylie’s staged snog on the show in 1999 (and casual sexism elsewhere) might sound like a direct link to the Uni Lad generation. But the way Evans introduced it reeked of old British vaudeville: he even shouts “Mother!” before introducing the clip. This music-hall English entertainer shtick was still the norm in the 90s; it still exists here and there, in Ant and Dec or Harry Hill. But by series six of TFI Friday, reality television had exploded on to our screens in the form of Big Brother. Instead of constructed joviality, we got the real thing – plus some dumb, Machiavellian and downright hateful behaviour thrown into the mix too.
You can see why the return of the 90s has happened. Bright, bubbly, self-taught talents such as Evans seem harder to find in today’s constructed reality mediascape. Contemporary entertainment seems anodyne in comparison. Phillip Schofield’s The Cube is The Crystal Maze stripped of any flamboyance or mystery. Perhaps the closest thing to TFI is the safely jocular BBC staple The One Show, which Evans hosted on Fridays until his recent transformation into telly’s comeback kid.
But it’s hard for anyone hankering after progressive broadcasting that feels relevant today not to despair at the return of TFI. It represents the worst in UK revival culture, betraying an absence of ingenuity or modernity, and no real desire to try and look for new ways to entertain. But I suppose we can always switch over – to Top Gear.
