Is a 40-year-old format the future of TV satire? This weekend, Channel 4 revived the cult 80s comedy floorshow Friday Night Live for a one-off screening to mark the broadcaster’s birthday. Here was the host, Ben Elton, shorn of mullet but still sparkly of jacket. Here was Harry Enfield’s Stavros, trading in his doner kebabs for “orgasmic coffee”, four decades on. But here too was the transgender comedy superstar du jour Jordan Gray, stealing the headlines with an outre moment summoning the spirit of the show’s Thatcher-era heyday. Hence the social media and critical buzz, which demanded: bring this show back, it’s as electrifying as ever.
Maybe that was just the nostalgia speaking. Certainly, viewers of a 1980s vintage – myself included – will have felt a powerful rush of yearning for yesteryear when Elton’s alternative comedy comrades (Ade Edmondson, French and Saunders, Stephen Fry) posted video well-wishes as the night began. Nothing was more thrilling than this show (originally broadcast as Saturday Live) when I was an impressionable young comedy fan. Emo Philips. The Dangerous Brothers. Emma Thompson doing standup! Denis Healey (ask your parents, youngsters) doing poetry! At a time of endless Tory rule (can you imagine?), the revolutionary energies of a new generation, and their untamed humour at the expense of the status quo, were distilled in this show.
It’s not quite fair to ask whether the anniversary edition measured up; that’s not exactly what it was trying to do. Can any show starring such a high quotient of sixtysomethings be considered cutting edge? But Friday Night Live had to pay its dues to its first-generation heroes, with prominent roles for Jo Brand and Julian Clary, who both got their TV breaks in this show, as well as Elton and Enfield, the latter not only as Stavros but as the upwardly mobile Thatcherite Loadsamoney too.
Hard to stifle a guffaw when he waddled on to the stage, wad of banknotes in hand. “Look at that, you fuel-poverty wankers!” Age has not withered his force-10 crassness, even if the routine is not notable for scalpel-like wit. Brand and Clary had a for-old-times’-sake charm, too, but seemed lacking in match fitness. A handful of sketch interludes (the impressionist Ronnie Ancona in among the crowd as an ever-so-humble Olivia Colman; Kayvan Novak’s Fonejacker, prank-calling a gym) were notable more for variety than comic quality.
To explain the excitement around the show’s revival, we must look elsewhere – to Elton’s performance, to the choice array of newcomers taking part and to the serendipitous timing that saw the show air at the end of a wild week in UK politics. The Liz Truss jokes flowed like plonk at a No 10 party, and were a gift to Elton. He joked that the chaos of 2022 had him pining for his old nemesis “Mrs Thatch”, who made the satirist’s job more straightforward because “at least you know she’d still be in power at the end of the programme”.
As Elton ranted on about the Tories, as motormouthed as ever, you could almost believe the last 34 years had never happened – until he returned later in the show with a jeremiad against cancel culture and the people who most often complain about it. Contradictory? A little. Bracingly topical and outspoken? Very much so. If Friday Night Live is to stake a claim on 21st-century satire (and there’s a gap in the market now Mock the Week has mocked its last), it will need, in Elton’s formulation, “a little bit of politics” like this. And why not supplied by the 63-year-old who did it first time around? Because, while the most creatively exciting moments in Friday Night Live 2.0 were all delivered by fledglings plucked from the live circuit, political satire is not necessarily their strong suit.
So we had the show’s most talked-about act, Jordan Gray, advertising her ravening ego in song before casting her clothes aside and playing the tune’s final notes with – well, let’s just say her fingers weren’t involved. An eye-catching TV moment, no doubt. But the song works better, to my mind, as part of Gray’s five-star show Is It a Bird?, whose audiences will have anticipated the all-exposing finale. Then there was Rosie Jones with five minutes on being disabled and devious, and the Edinburgh comedy award-winner Sam Campbell, with a loopy shaggy dog story about being kidnapped by a cabal of train drivers.
Friday Night Live was always about more than satire. But its renown depended on its spiky topicality. The closest these rookies came to that was with Thanyia Moore and Michael Odewale’s spoof news segment – which was likable enough, if unadventurously in that news-spoof tradition that links The Two Ronnies to The Mash Report and beyond. Then there was Mawaan Rizwan with his droll song Are You Checking Me Out Or Are You Just a Racist? And Leo Reich, whose gen-Z narcissist persona could be the Loadsamoney of this generation, even if his five-minute slot allowed us only a diluted glimpse here.
With talent like Reich, Rizwan and Campbell to play with, there may indeed be mileage in a full revival for Friday Night (or even Saturday) Live. It remains a bulletproof format, more flexible than Live at the Apollo, with a hint of TFI Friday-style anarchy and stage space not just for comics but bands too. Given regular slots, like their alternative comedy forebears, it would be thrilling to see these young guns develop their acts, and their relationship with the audience, week after week on screen.
But maybe there’s something to be salvaged, too, from the intergenerational nature of this special edition. Elton still has the chops, half a lifetime on. So too does Enfield, as anyone watching another anniversary special, this week’s The Love Box In Your Living Room on BBC Two, will be sharply reminded. Given the rarity today of forthright political satire, perhaps the surest way to honour the militant, in-yer-face spirit of the original is not to supersede these old stagers, but – in tandem with these fantastic next-generation talents – to sign them up.
This article was amended on 26 October 2022 to correct the name of the TV show TFI Friday.
