He joked, cooked and copied Americans: how Ivan Urgant changed while working in television

It’s hard to believe, but Urgant has been working in television for almost a quarter of a century!

Many believe that this popular morning show on the music channel was Urgant’s first work on television, but that is not the case. He joined the transmission team, where Olga Shelest was his co-host, in 2001, and in 1999 Ivan managed to work as the host of the program Petersburg Courier on Channel Five. By the way, he hosted several other programs on MTV: “Total Show” and “Big Cinema”, as well as “Expresso”, where his co-host was Tanya Gevorkyan, with whom he had an affair. But they marked the public less than the sparkling “Cheerful Morning”.

After leaving MTV, Urgant became the host of a new musical television talent show. Together with Fekla Tolstaya, he took part in the first two seasons of the project, the winners of which were respectively Alexey Goman and Ruslan Alekhno.

Urgant moved to the first button in 2005, starting with the Big Premiere program, then getting his first show – Spring with Ivan Urgant. But these projects did not take root. But the real success was his arrival on the cooking show “Smak” in 2006, where Urgant replaced Andrei Makarevich *, who stood there in the kitchen for more than 10 years. By the way, Makarevich * himself offered Urgant to replace him in this position. Urgant ran Smak until the program closed in 2018.

In 2008, a program appeared on the air, thanks to which Urgant gained a foothold in the role that became his trademark – a showman of parody and entertainment programs. The idea for the program was borrowed from similar American and German shows, but was not a direct adaptation – Alexander Tsekalo and Ruslan Sorokin were officially the authors of the idea. The feature of the program was various parodies – about famous personalities, serials, commercials, popular TV programs and even paintings. Urgant hosted the show until 2012.

Simultaneously with the parody show, Urgant also hosted this show on the channel, where Garik Martirosyan, Sergey Svetlakov and Alexander Tsekalo were his co-hosts. The four of them jokingly chatted about the latest studio news and headlines. Each episode also featured a guest politician or show business star. Foreign stars who came to Moscow also watched the shooting, for example, Antonio Banderas and Daniel Radcliffe. Later, this tradition will be continued by the show Soirée Urgant.

In 2012, ProjectorParisHilton was closed in its original format, while Svetlakov and Martirosyan switched to DTT.

Well, Urgant did not remain without work – the entertainment format, which the audience liked, was slightly changed, taking the popular evening American Late Night Show as its basis, and in 2012 they released the Evening Urgant program.

In the studio, Ivan again humorously commented on the latest news, chatted with the guests, and the mood was set by the Fruit group, which performed the musical intro to the show and various improvisations live. The program also featured various ongoing humorous features. One of the most striking is “A sharp relationship with Alla Mikheeva”. The show aired until February 2022, after which it was put on hiatus.

*Included in the list of natural persons acting as a foreign agent

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