Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. The quintessential end-of-week ritual in the 90s was a plate of fish & chips followed by slumping in front of the telly watching back-to-back comedy shows on BBC2 and/or Channel Four from 9 to unconsciousness. BBC2 could have Bottom, Rab C. Nesbitt and Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round while Channel Four had Friends, Father Ted and Frasier. Thank god for VCRs. Here (via Chriddof) is part one of a record of one such evening on Four in the dying days of the original blocks - twenty years ago, people. YOU ARE OLD
We start with a programme caption in the short lived "ambient blocks" style for Mark Radcliffe's post-pub live music and ironic detachment show The White Room - not only that, but it's the only episode of it anyone remembers, when Iggy Pop came on in transparent trousers and terrified the nation.
But right now, it's time for the enforced fun of TFI Friday! The show opens with a skit about Jarvis Cocker's stage invasion at the Brits, which had presumably happened that week. Must be late February 1996, making this one of the first editions ever. The Brits that year were of course hosted by TFI's inescapable commandant, Chris Evans, whose ego was just about to reach "rampaging kaiju" status before a decade of failure as a producer brought him back to humility and tolerability...until the success started to feed the beast again...
Anyway we skip straight past that to a trailer for a Film on Four: Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends, a film so inherently English and middle-class that it's a shock to discover it was actually written by Rita Rudner and her husband. Then another caption explains what we'll be watching next: cheerful festival of sleaze Eurotrash, with the UK's Frenchest presenting team of John Paul Gaultier and Antoine de Caunes.
First, though, Father Ted! At this point, prime-time Channel Four often eschewed standard indents and announcements in favour of using their face-of-the-channel trailer stings, especially for comedy and entertainment. It kind of softened us up for the upcoming radical overhaul of the Circles era. Here's one starring Lee Evans twice to introduce one of the station's finest sitcoms, if not the finest. It's "Grant Unto Him Eternal Rest", the pilot and series 1 finale, presumably being repeated ahead of series 2's debut in March.
Then: commercials! To tell the truth, Chriddof left this commercial break out of the original upload by mistake and uploaded them separately; I forget where they originally went, so I've arbitrarily put them here.
First is a very stupid advert which looks for some mad reason like it should be for a bank, but turns out to be for a car. Skoda was gradually absorbed by Volkswagen over the course of the 1990s, which eventually helped rid the marque of its laughing-stock status. Adverts like this did not speed the process.
Next: jeans. Some tosser resembling a fey Marlboro man is trapped in the video game Full Throttle and gets into scrapes with various violent inbred impoverished alcoholics. While wearing blue trousers.
Then: chips. BUT THESE ARE NO ORDINARY CHIPS. They are apparently radioactive and cause horrifying Son of the Mask-style mutations in their consumers. They're coated in something or other that makes them taste interesting and different and god help me when I was 13 that was enough to make me want to buy some. Delivering the slogan: Chris Evans again. He was everywhere in 1996. Everywhere.
As if that wasn't enough CGI horror, M&Ms arrive next, attacking various blue-grey objects and spitting them out as mainstream-acceptable but often horrific monstrosities: a crown green bowler turns into a basketball player, an unassuming fish becomes a giant pirahna, and most disturbing of all bunch of escaped convicts become terrifying clowns. All to a strange burst of Rednex-ish fiddle techno and Alexei Sayle. Seems better suited to Skittles than M&Ms, but whatever I still like it better than anything with those latter-day comedy characters. Way to make me sick of Billy West, guys.
Next: quite a clever advert, as it looks identical to any other irritating scratchcard-related bullshit right and then pulls out the rug from under you and beats you in the head with its social conscience.
After that, what seems like an authentic Patak family member off on a grocery run turns out to be a white guy instead.
And then a quick commercial for KFC which really sums up the year 1996 better than I ever could, from the Spice Girls quote (which admittedly is a coincidence since Wannabe hadn't come out yet) to the unnecessary and disorienting fisheye lens, to the costumes and hair and even the lighting.
Then there's a quick shot of a naked Amanda Lamb for some sort of magic Vaseline skin cream featuring loads of bollocks ingredients, and that Skoda advert suddenly realises it didn't say anything about the car the first time and rushes back with a phone number.
Негізгі бет Ойын-сауық Trip Your Trigger: Channel Four Continuity and Adverts, February 1996
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