They’re selling pre-faded Friends T-shirts in Primark. Proof, were it needed, of the Nineties nostalgia that makes the return of TFI Friday, Chris Evans’s rambunctious light entertainment show, perfectly timed. Gateway to the weekend and window on politically incorrect celebrity behaviour, the show landed on Channel 4 in the middle of an entertainment desert and quickly established itself as the antidote to other moribund formats.
The first episode opened with Evans striding into a doctor’s office to identify the corpse of Top of the Pops, eyebrows waggling and self-satisfied grin plastered all over his face. Later in the same episode, two audience members debated whether or not Saturday teatime staple Noel’s House Party was past its sell-by date. (They concluded it was.)
It was a brash, boastful vehicle for Evans’s ego and I remember looking forward to each episode, hanging on every anarchic second as the camera nose-dived over the het-up audience and yet another woman in a backless dress conducted an interview with the host entirely in double entendres. I loved it and I wanted to go to that mock-up bar and pretend the famous people were my friends, because I was a bored teenager in rural Warwickshire. But also because behind the loud trousers and mugging to camera was writer Danny Baker’s more subtle contribution, giving the whole thing a backbone it would otherwise have lacked. His fertile imagination provided the show with its shape and most of its wit.
But the rebooted show can’t return completely unchanged. A quick trawl of internet clips flags up just how unrelentingly sexist it was. As we get nostalgic for the 90s, the 90s versions of us were, in turn, apparently nostalgic for the brash Carry On sensibility of the 70s. Yes, TFI bottled the pure spirit of pre-millennial laddism and splashed it on liberally while listening to melodic guitar pop and gawping at pictures of Denise van Outen winking with a lollipop. But the sexual politics came from two decades earlier; a fetishising of carnal incontinence and alcoholic abandon. The new version needs to have grown up with its audience because we’re all old now and times have moved on.
And yet the first guest announced for the new show is Jeremy Clarkson, a man whose ideas about the world seem largely more at home in a time before the re-emergence of mainstream feminism. The booking shows that Evans’s desire to court controversy remains intact – he is rumoured to be Clarkson’s replacement on Top Gear – but the combined smugness of both millionaires, boring on about who has the biggest car and talking about a world most of us could never hope to live in, does not sound compelling. It’ll just be the sound of revving engines until they cut to an ad break.
Yet the pair’s popularity is undeniable. Hundreds of thousands bayed for Clarkson’s return to Top Gear and Evans still draws big audiences to his Radio 2 breakfast show, perhaps because both men stand for a similar thing in the cultural landscape: they recall a time when presenters could say what they liked and get away with it. There’s nostalgia for that, too. Now that every verbal expulsion is monitored by social media, the collective knee always ready to jerk at the slightest transgression, there’s an inevitable hankering for celebrities who just “tells it like it is”.
With stiff broadcasting regulations and the thumbs of a million self-appointed Twitter watchdogs hovering expectantly, I can’t imagine they’ll manage anything more than a pre-watershed “bloody” or a risqué remark about breaking the speed limit. But while no one wants a retrogressive lad-fest back on their screens, if TFI comes back with its balls in a jar, is there any point?
