Throw it all back
I.am a terrible twister
THE One Show guest Sheena Easton on about her Wikipedia’s entry Street: “It West End show 42nd as an describes my character who hasn’t had over-the-hill diva and is a hit in ten years inability to legendary for her the dance.” See also of dictionary definition “typecast”. ITV elbowed the News at Ten for the third week running and booked Davina McCall to host late-night topical disaster The Nightly Show.
A strange decision in the best of circumstances.
But then the weirdest thing happened. Davina McCall the ladette from the 1990s showed up, complete with an old DJ pal named Fat Tony.
So it was clear from the off that this was going to be a very different kind of beast to the catastrophic watches of David Walliams and John Bishop, a sort of TFI The Nightly Show.
At first it seemed Davina, high-fiving her way to the stage and twerking guests, had simply decided to let her hair down and refuse to act her age for a week.
Not a justifiable reason to keep Tom Bradby waiting half an hour, obviously, though fair enough.nough. But then, with gloww sticks in hand and Fatat Tony playing back-in-then-theday club anthem m Big Fun, by Inner City, she announced: “It’s Throwback Thursday!” and the penny dropped. Davina McCall is actually still living in the 90s.
You see, “Throwback Thursday” had followed throwback Monday, with Boy George, throwback Tuesday, with onequarter of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, David Baddiel, and ex-Radio One breakfast show host Sara Cox.
And throwback Wednesday, with the host and Paddy McGuinness reenacting his before-he-was-famous appearance on her late-night dating show God’s Gift, with Davina saying: “This show is so 90s it’s like a Tamagotchi doing the Macarena.” TV had regressed 20 years. So when she opened Thursday’s sorry episode with the usual: “We’re going to be making fun of whatever is going on in the world right now,” I half expected the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of Yugo Yugoslavia. But that wasn’t the oddest thing about the unfolding calamity. The ladette persona that had landed, the constant 90s music and references to shows she hosted back then, like Prickly Heat and Streetmate, the endless, unnecessary dancing and the weird obsession with vibrators and threesomes was incongruous with the 2017, happily married, motherof-three Davina McCall. It was all just, well, bizarre. She wasn’t helped by the dreadful format, pranks that backfired and the writers dispensing with punchlines.
When News at Ten’s Alastair Stewart said during the ads: “Coming up after The Nightly Show, hunger and death…” I thought: “Finally, some light relief.”
So it was a pity that they missed a trick as Davina was signing off on Friday: “I’ve insisted that Fat Tony plays a suitable song to end the week on.”
Chopin’s Funeral March in B-flat minor. Hit it, Tony. FEBRUARY 25, The Voice battles, resident hypocrite Will.i.am am putting Lia White e through against Victoria Kerley: “If it was up to me, you guys would be with me all the way