Know Your Enemy

"A cursory listen to the soundtrack to the comeback, TFI Friday: The Album, which went to number one in the iTunes chart following the live show, suggests what this is really about: an exercise in extracting more readies from £50 man. We’re already living through a deeply conservative cultural moment, and dad rock fronted by the new presenter of Top Gear tips the balance even further."

At last, I've found someone else - Tim Burrows, writing for the Guardian - who refuses to put on rose-tinted glasses and express delight at the return of TFI Friday. It was, as Burrows rightly comments, "the place that Britpop came to die". Much as I'm glad it died, it was a slow, drawn-out and painful death.

If there's one good thing to come of TFI Friday's revival, it's that it's had me chuckling once again at the thought of Luke Haines' characterisation of Evans when they met on the pilot episode: "an unpleasant creature: a shallow bullying man-child, a jumped-up kissogram-turned-light-entertainment-colossus. Camp commandant of the joyless Radio 1 breakfast show, and now about to extend his metier as a kind of Britpop Joseph Goebbels to a torturous television show of his own creation".

(Thanks to Terry for the link.)