Chris Evans has suggested that his old music-and-chatshow TFI Friday will be returning later this year. But the raucous series, which ran on Channel 4 from 1996 to 2000, and came back for a brief revival in 2015, could appear in a very different format. “The thing is, you don’t need a TV channel now,” Evans told listeners of his Virgin Radio breakfast show. “TFI Friday doesn’t have to be an hour long, it could be longer, we could livestream it.” He said it could draw on its wealth of archive material, some unbroadcast, which made me personally very excited to see if there was a performance of a Kula Shaker B-side tucked away somewhere on a hard drive.
You can find compilations of the show in its 90s heyday on YouTube and some of it has aged better than I expected, based solely on my memories of sitting down to watch it after school on a Friday night. Many of its comedy “bits” are deliberately amateurish and would easily find a home on TikTok or Reels today. Its everything’s-a-joke, only-kidding tone dominates vast corners of the internet now. Its interviews are freewheeling, in a podcast kind of way. Considering it was on at teatime, there was a sense that anything could happen, though the worst that did happen was the odd celebrity saying “fuck” on air.
