The biggest chatshow news of 2026 so far has been Claudia Winkleman\u2019s foray into celebrity chin-wagging, not least because there was something slightly hubristic about the beloved Traitors host taking on the genre. Not because of any shortcomings on Winkleman\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
As the country was watching Winkleman, however, another veteran broadcaster was debuting their own new(ish) chatshow to far less fanfare \u2013 and far less pressure. In February, Chris Evans<\/a> began putting out episodes of TFI: Unplugged on YouTube. Produced by Virgin Radio \u2013 where Evans has hosted the breakfast show for the past seven years \u2013 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 \u2013 so much so that Channel 4 considered it worth its 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?<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t 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 \u201cnuts\u201d, jokes Will Macdonald, Evans\u2019s longtime TFI sidekick, in this latest instalment. It\u2019s seemingly a reference to the former\u2019s abrupt departure from Top Gear the following year, but unfortunately we don\u2019t 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\u2019d have to be pretty obsessive about the show\u2019s lore to get any kicks out of this section \u2013 although anyone can enjoy Macdonald\u2019s latest stunt, which involves him pouring beer into a sherry glass without using his hands.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cFat Lookalikes\u201d) that siphoned cool from Britpop (many of the scene\u2019s bands performed) and hosted cheeky interrogations that have since been repackaged as clickbaity YouTube videos with titles like \u201cVinnie Jones Storms Out Of Live TV Interview\u201d (he only did it as a joke).<\/p>\n The show also featured an appearance from Indian superstar Shreya Ghoshal. Photograph: Virgin Radio \/ Channel 4<\/p>\n That said, we do get some actual footage from the first time round: Evans\u2019 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 \u2013 in which an inordinately garrulous Bowie claims to have contracted gastroenteritis from eating monkey meat \u2013 is bizarre, and not in a good way.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>) and Indian superstar Shreya Ghoshal, who performs a cover of Coldplay\u2019s 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\u2019t sing because he\u2019s lost his voice.<\/p>\n 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 \u201clike the old one \u2013 only 1% of the budget\u201d. When announcing the broadcast, Channel 4<\/a> commissioning editor Cimran Shah claimed TFI was doing \u201cstripped-back, personality-led chat long before visualised-podcasts were a twinkle in our eyes!\u201d The old TFI didn\u2019t remotely resemble a podcast \u2013 a form which has the capacity to be outrageous only in quite a nerdy, ideas-based way \u2013 but aesthetically this reboot is closer to video-of-audio than anything else.<\/p>\n In spirit, though, it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019 interview style is intense and energetic but, unlike the insight you often get from podcast conversations, generally quite superficial.<\/p>\n Overall, rebranding as a grassroots endeavour isn\u2019t a terrible idea. While TFI Friday Unplugged won\u2019t trouble the zeitgeist \u2013 or upstage Winkleman\u2019s similarly fraught attempts at making a success of the chatshow \u2013 this cosy yet hectic revival is catering to a nostalgic niche just about well enough to justify its inexpensive existence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The biggest chatshow news of 2026 so far has been Claudia Winkleman\u2019s foray into celebrity chin-wagging, not least…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-613960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}