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The biggest chatshow news of 2026 so far has been Claudia Winkleman’s foray into celebrity chinwagging, not least because there was something slightly hubristic about the beloved Traitors host taking on the genre. Not because of any shortcomings on Winkleman’s part, but because chatshows seem almost impossible to get right (especially for female hosts; the UK TV landscape is littered with single-series attempts by Nigella, Davina and Lily Allen).
As the country was watching Winkleman, however, another veteran broadcaster was debuting their own new(ish) chatshow to far less fanfare – and far less pressure. In February, Chris Evans began putting out episodes of TFI: Unplugged on YouTube. Produced by Virgin Radio – where Evans has hosted the breakfast show for the past seven years – this was a lo-fi endeavour that saw the presenter joined by a handful of guests in a poky studio lined by dressed-down staff members professionally obliged to laugh and whoop. Still, the guests were good (Danny Dyer, Chris Hemsworth, Bono, Noah Wyle) and the show quickly built a decent audience – so much so that Channel 4 considered it worth their while to acquire a run of six episodes that have just begun airing at 11pm on Fridays. Will this revival of the 1990s juggernaut turn out to be the real chatshow story of the year?
This isn’t the first time the TFI franchise has been revived. There was an anniversary special and one new series in 2015, yet the comeback was stymied by Evans going “nuts”, jokes Will Macdonald, Evans’s longtime TFI sidekick, in this latest instalment. It’s seemingly a reference to the former’s abrupt departure from Top Gear the following year, but unfortunately we don’t get any more insight into that decade-old drama. We do, however, get Macdonald showcasing some books he wrote in the 1990s capitalising on his TFI feature Pub Genius, which involved him performing boozer-themed party tricks. You’d have to be pretty obsessive about the show’s lore to get any kicks out of this section – although anyone can enjoy Macdonald’s latest stunt, which involves him pouring beer into a sherry glass without using his hands.
This is about as close as TFI: Unplugged gets to recapturing the spirit of the original, which is mostly a relief. Undeniably zeitgeisty, the original show always had a certain moral queasiness: a bonanza of laddish and often cruel humour (other regular features included the self-explanatory “Fat Lookalikes”) that siphoned cool from Britpop (many of the scene’s bands performed) and hosted cheeky interrogations that have since been repackaged as clickbaity YouTube videos with titles like “Vinnie Jones Storms Out Of Live TV Interview” (he only did it as a joke).
That said, we do get some actual footage from the first time round: Evans’ 1999 interview with David Bowie is spliced into the show (the second time it has appeared in an Unplugged episode). You can see why the presenter is so keen to remind people it happened, but this bizarre encounter – in which an inordinately garrulous Bowie claims to have contracted gastroenteritis from eating monkey meat – is bizarre, and not in a good way.
More enjoyable are the snippets of vintage musical performances: Sleeper, The Cure, Garbage. At a time when music has disappeared from broadcast TV, Evans seems intent on redressing the balance. His present-day guests include Jack Savoretti (who Evans repeatedly congratulates for getting to No 1 in the album charts this week; awkwardly, he actually only reached No 2) and Indian superstar Shreya Ghoshal, who performs a cover of Coldplay’s Fix You. The press release for this episode also promised Gemma Arterton and Peter Capaldi, but the only other guest is another musician, Sam Ryder, who can’t sing because he’s lost his voice.
Aside from a total absence of bad taste provocation, the other main difference between this TFI and its predecessor is the quality. This is addressed early doors in a fittingly half-arsed pastiche of Netflix docuseries Formula 1: Drive To Survive, during which Evans describes this version of his show as “like the old one – only 1% of the budget”. When announcing the broadcast, Channel 4 commissioning editor Cimran Shah claimed TFI was doing “stripped-back, personality-led chat long before visualised-podcasts were a twinkle in our eyes!” The old TFI didn’t remotely resemble a podcast – a form which has the capacity to be outrageous only in quite a nerdy, ideas-based way – but aesthetically this reboot is closer to video-of-audio than anything else.
In spirit, though, it doesn’t feel very timely. The beauty of the interview podcast is that it maintains the illusion of a private conversation, which means its participants are not cravenly playing up to an audience. This show, on the other hand, has managed to preserve the sweaty, rictus-smile frenzy of live TV while ditching any thrilling glamour. Evans’ interview style is intense and energetic but, unlike the insight you often get from podcast conversations, generally quite superficial.
Overall, rebranding as a grassroots endeavour isn’t a terrible idea. While TFI Friday Unplugged won’t trouble the zeitgeist – or upstage Winkleman’s similarly fraught attempts at making a success of the chatshow – this cosy yet hectic revival is catering to a nostalgic niche just about well enough to justify its inexpensive existence.
