Stepping into the TFI Friday bar, just as the show’s theme tune blasts out over the PA, is a surreal experience. There’s Chris Evans. There’s Danny Baker. There’s Will “Wiiiiillll” MacDonald. Yes, it’s a slightly different layout, and everyone looks older but it is TFI Friday, there’s no doubt about it. And in 2015, that’s quite a bizarre concept.
The original series caught the tail-end of Britpop’s pomp and posturing between 1996 and 2000, condensing all the cocksure Loaded laddishness of those years into one hour of (sometimes controversial) TV. Its most famous moments – Shaun Ryder effing and jeffing, Geri and Kylie snogging, guests entering to the struttable tune of The Riverboat Song – are seared onto the collective consciousness of anyone who had a telly and a Friday night in ahead of them at the time. But the show also shared some of Britpop’s blinkered overconfidence: features like Ugly Blokes, Freak Or Unique and Fat Lookalikes hardly have you pining for a time when this “it’s only a bit of bantz” attitude was seen as OK and serve to date it quicker than a 90s fashion disaster (think skousers). When it ended, nothing came along to replace it.
Evans’s grey temples and the seriousness with which he conducts rehearsals suggest a show matured. Glasses propped on his head, joviality saved for the live show, he dictates camera angles, chops items, runs through links, all with straight-faced urgency. It’s a live show, so any editing is done in rehearsals. At least that’s the idea.
Afterwards, a busy Evans paces his dressing room. “I’ve just got one more phone call to make, I’m so sorry.” He puts his phone to his ear. “Hi, David,” – it’s David Coulthard – “so, we’ve just had this idea…”
Evans explains how he’d like to honour a young, car racing-obsessed boy who donated the contents of his piggy bank after a poppy collection was stolen by sending him to Race Of Champions at the Olympic Stadium. Once Coulthard is on board, Evans sits down. He’s wearing Lycra trousers. “I’m about to go for a run,” he says, answering a question I’d professionally decided against asking. It’s only now, after rehearsals, that new bits like the last-minute drafting-in of ex-Formula 1 racing drivers have been hastily arranged: “The show’s done, so we’ve got time to fuck around.” Love it or hate it, TFI’s seat-of-its-pants ramshackleness isn’t an artifice.
“The old TFI was a tour de force,” says Evans. “It never questioned itself. Even when maybe it should have questioned itself.” Yet, as the (at the time) one-off reunion back in July proved, the show retains a lot of goodwill, not least from those making it.
“There was never any question of being involved,” says MacDonald, a man who has apparently delegated 15 years’ worth of ageing to an underling. Each of the original core unit of Evans, MacDonald and producers Suzi Aplin and Clare Barton, all back in 2015, echo this. Even Danny Baker is feeling “luvvly jubbly” about the whole thing. “If anyone hadn’t have come back, we couldn’t have done it,” says Evans. “Though before, I didn’t understand how so many bands couldn’t get back together again 10 or 20 years later. Now I do. It’s because it’s a nightmare.”
In the 90s, Evans would have got through with youthful enthusiasm and healthy measures of booze. (“Everyone was pissed through half of the shows,” says Barton.) And now? “Last night I had nine hours’ kip,” Evans says, “which I’ve not done for years.” Bleary-eyed days may not be a problem Evans has to deal with for long: he leaves after the show to film a piece for Top Gear, commitments that he’s also said will preclude him from doing TFI in the future. When pressed on this, all he says mysteriously is: “Well, we’re not saying we’re not going to make any more.”
Whoever ends up taking his place, however, an open bar remains a TFI constant. The countdown to going on air begins, drinks flow, and tension builds. It’s all a little bit exciting. “Things will go wrong,” says Evans. “And if they didn’t, we shouldn’t be live.” The cameras roll, and, between interviews, a man plays a song by blowing ping-pong balls at gin bottles. There are skits involving Maltesers rolling down tape measures into people’s mouths. A man in a cement mixer plays a kazoo. I have no idea whether it’s interesting to watch at home at all. But – and perhaps it is down to the booze – in that bar, it makes sense.
After the show, Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics and Mark Ronson mill around chatting to guests. Little Mix make a swift exit, and I genuinely fear this was caused by me resting on one of their shoulders when a cameraman asked me to make some room. The evening passed with no swearing and no controversy, because TFI Friday just isn’t that show any more. It’s like a best man’s speech: the gist of ribald raconteurism is there, but it’s sanded down for modern tastes, preempting, perhaps, any social media backlashes. “We’re older and we don’t live the lives that we used to live,” says Evans.
“It makes it all sound so wanky,” says MacDonald, wary of over-thinking the show’s place in 2015. Then Danny Baker trundles past, his pint spilling over the edges of his glass. Things haven’t changed that much.
TFI Friday continues Friday, 8pm, Channel 4
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