The resurrected version of TFI Friday – which reaches it second episode tonight at 8pm on Channel 4 – has a feel that’s very unusual for a high-profile new TV series.
Most just-launched shows are like house guests at a luxury residence – desperate to impress enough to be invited back next year. In this case, though, no matter how successful the project proves, presenter Chris Evans presumably can’t be available to front another run, as he is in pre-production for the post-Clarkson Top Gear on BBC2. Although Evans is known for workloads that require a super-size appointments diary, if he tried to keep running TFI Friday alongside the motoring show, the BBC director general might add a bizarre twist to a recent broadcasting scandal by thumping a Top Gear presenter.
As a result, this reboot of Evans’s 90s hit has the strange status of being partly a warm-up for his takeover from Clarkson and also a lap of honour for his former franchise. At the start of last week’s opener, Evans described it as “a bonus run of 10 shows”, a formula presumably calculated to reassure his BBC bosses of his future focus but which ran the risk of suggesting that viewers should feel lucky to be getting these programmes.
The show goes out live, which Evans proved last week by hanging a functioning clock around his neck for the introductory link, and then keeping the timepiece in shot during the interviews. But the risk of this insistence on immediacy is to raise doubts about how comfortable a vehicle for Evans Top Gear will be.
Almost all of the highlights on his broadcasting CV – The Big Breakfast, the Radio 2 morning show and BBC1’s The One Show – have in common with TFI Friday that they are as-it-happens formats that the presenter further adrenalises with rapid patter and a gang dynamic involving sidekicks or audience to create an atmosphere of spontaneous mayhem, which, on the evidence of the first show, will again be the default quality of TFI Friday.
In contrast, Top Gear – at least in the Clarkson version that kept so many viewers and lawyers raptly watching – was written and edited with great deliberation, its air of danger coming not from going with a live flow but from carefully chosen words and images which, as the post-bag from ambassadors around the world proved, generally hit their intended targets.
On the new TFI Friday, though, as on most of his projects, the script is so generically functional that Evans is even able to invite guests and members of the audience to read the next bit from the teleprompter for him. Such ambushes might work in the audience elements of Top Gear (assuming the hanger sections are retained in the revamp), but writing to pictures and delivering location pieces to camera – particular accomplishments of Clarkson – will be an entirely new skill for Evans to learn.
Where this bonus run of his old TV show seems to bode well for next year’s launch of the new one is further evidence of the celebrity pulling-power that Evans consistently demonstrates on Radio 2. The first TFI had Steve Coogan as the main interviewee, with U2 and Take That as the musical acts, while Justin Bieber is promised for tonight. So his Top Gear seems unlikely to be short of stars, whether in reasonably priced cars or some other seating arrangement.
Opening his Channel 4 comeback with a stunt item – “a slip and slide” game that involved participants shooting down a sort of lubricated luge – also looked like a run-up for BBC2 next year. One of the people sent down the slippery tunnel was Will MacDonald, the presenter’s long-time producer and sidekick, which made you wonder if this trusty underling might be in the frame as a Hammond or May to Evans’s pseudo-Clarko.
At one point last week, Evans seemed to forget that he wasn’t on the radio, asking a guest the wireless down-the-line question, “Are you there?”, when the guy was standing in front of him. But otherwise he looked visibly thrilled to be back on the screen in a format that, far more than The One Show, is under his control.
Probably the most revealing element of the new TFI is a segment called “Too good not to be on TV”. It’s a platform for unknown acts that have come to the presenter’s attention, but this TV one-two – using TFI to get in shape for Top Gear – gives notice of the hugely renewed televisual ambitions of a man who clearly feels too good just to be on the radio.
