Depressing plebgasm of a quiz show from 1994, a stepping stone in Chris Evans’ boring plans for media domination. If it’s any consolation, he hated it too.
1.
In one edition of this 1994 quiz show, Chris Evans played a game entitled ‘How’s Your Father?’. This involved him dashing through the studio audience and picking a contestant (about whom he had obviously done a lot of research) at ‘random’ and asking said question. Whatever the contestant’s response, Evans was due to made a ‘Well, why not ask him yourself?’ type exclamation and the contestant’s father would promptly walk out onto the stage. However, when it came to do it, Evans mis-counted the number of seats. ‘How’s your father?’ he asked one woman. ‘Erm...he’s dead,’ she replied, silencing the studio. Evans came out of character and apologised. ‘Is your name not Jackie?’ he asked. She assured him that it was not. After some confusion, he found the correct contestant and got on with the game. However, in the show’s teatime repeat, this embarrassing goof was cut completely. As a result, Evans was seen to dash up some stairs, and then dash down them again for no reason.
[NOTE: TFI Friday (1996-Present) was initially broadcast live until Shaun Ryder used a torrent of expletives and Channel 4 insisted on there being a half-hour ‘delay’ for future broadcasts: in the event of a profanity, the offending word is cut before it is transmitted. This technique is often used in radio phone-ins - Talk Radio use a delay of about ten seconds, for example. When a swear-word is cut, the transmission returns to real-time for a few seconds while the signal is digitally restored and the delay can operate once more. Recent editions of TFI Friday, however, have been recorded at about 3pm in the afternoon of transmission, and two separate edits have been prepared for the two broadcasts. Ben Elton’s reference to Bill Clinton’s ‘spunk’ and Boy George talking about him and Jon Moss having a ‘shag’ were cut for the 6pm transmissions, but reinstated for the late-night repeats.]
We couldn’t find any ‘Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush’ to illustrate this bit so here’s
a few grabs from Evans on the late lamented 7am kids show ‘TV Mayhem’.
