Look back in anger | 25 June 2015

‘Cringe!’ said Boy, after I’d exposed him to a few seconds of last week’s special nostalgia edition of TFI Friday. And he did have a point. From its once almost-daring name to its zany title graphics to its whatever-happened-to guest list (Shaun Ryder, Blur, Ewan McGregor), Chris Evans’s irredeemably Nineties game show now looks so dated and impossibly remote you might as well be looking at an early episode of Face to Face with John Freeman, or The Black and White Minstrel Show or Muffin the Mule. Gosh, time is cruel.

But it was great at the time, right? No, it wasn’t, actually. I watched this one-off revival mainly to remind myself why I almost never watched it when it was on originally. Very quickly I remembered. Because it was shit.

Why was it so shit? Well, there’s material for several PhD theses there, but I think what it boils down to is partly the awkward atmosphere — like turning up at the beery barbecue of a leery neighbour and instantly regretting it. And mainly to the eerie mediocrity of its presenter Chris Evans, who rose without trace in the early Nineties to become one of the era’s most ubiquitous, overpromoted and best-paid ‘personalities’ without any of us really understanding why.

With hindsight, the answer seems fairly obvious. He was commercially astute, incredibly pushy and brimming with bold and novel format ideas, as he demonstrated on shows such as Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. In the penultimate episode, Evans announced that if the studio contestants won their exotic holiday, then he would take the entire audience for a week’s holiday at Disneyland, Paris. They did win: so off to Paris everyone went.

Strip away all the whacko stunts and amusing wheezes, though, and what you’re left with basically is a host with only three noticeable qualities: big glasses, carrot-coloured hair and a ready laugh.