by Chris Evans
To plan an hour of radio I actually draw a clock, I use a CD to draw around—it’s the perfect size. I then fill in all the things that must happen at the corresponding times, shade in those areas and then see how much room there is for anything else to happen. That’s the me bit.
I still use this method today. Over the page is a drivetime clock from my Radio 2 Drivetime Show.
For this, my first London radio show, it was very important for me to trade off the back of what I knew the listeners were guaranteed to like, i.e. quality records and information and then nip in and out with a bit of my stuff. I would do this gradually for the first few weeks then as my confidence and relationship with the listeners grew, I could start to exchange more of the solid gold musical bricks for those speech-based ones of my own.
After the news, which was usually around three minutes, to open each hour I decided to play two records back to back instead of just the one, that’s another eight minutes. My first link would be a menu telling you what’s coming up on the rest of the show followed by another record—another five minutes. Then I’d do my first feature, a phone call or an interview followed by a fourth record—another nine or ten minutes.
If you do the maths here, it’s already close to half past the hour. Suddenly being on the radio is not such a formidable prospect!
I wanted this show to be informal, that’s how I would make it different. I was nowhere near as slick as some of the polished pros around me—so I decided to make a virtue of a far more conversational, relaxed and open style. I was also conscious of the fact that this was a local London show and I was an out and out Northerner, somewhere along the line I would have to come up with an idea that would get me round this issue.
The show went on the air under the title Round at Chris’s. It was a title I thought would help. I wanted to convey the idea that this was my home and anyone was welcome. I genuinely encouraged people who knew me and who might be listening to drop by—which thankfully they did.
Covering the London angle was a little trickier but it was the weekend and our listeners were more doers than talkers; they loved to get out there, in amongst it, and seeing as it was Saturday afternoon—how about a what’s on guide?
Not the most groundbreaking idea, I admit, but it was simple, useful and effective—after all we were in one of the most exciting cities in the world, there was always loads going on, how about we just let people know when and where. If some kind of what’s on guide could be delivered in an upbeat and entertaining way, I thought it was more than justified being part of the programme. Shows always need pegs to hang their coats on and the more pegs the better—the imparting of information is a great way to do this.
The what’s on guide would primarily be based around things I knew little or nothing about, so I concluded it was probably best to get someone else to present this segment. Who was the most London person I knew? How about the crazy lady with the cockney voice as loud as a foghorn? Carol the traffic girl from Radio Radio—my future wife! She was London, remember.
Carol, having never actually been on the radio before, jumped at the chance of having a go. I have to admit she was a little clunky to start off with but weren’t we all? She found her radio voice soon enough though and in no time at all was hailed as our very own Time Out Totty.
Carol was all over the social scene and knew exactly what was going down, from designer sales to the latest new comedy clubs. When she arrived at the studio, she was always totally prepared and impeccably dressed—although sometimes still a little hungover from another late night out. Not that this was a problem—on the contrary it added to her character as she regaled the audience with her tales of the previous evening’s merriment. This only served to enhance the weekend feel we were trying to achieve. Well done, Carol, and the listeners loved her. She was very good and she was very funny and for some bizarre reason the majority of our listeners also thought she was black, something to this day I’ve never quite understood.
Carol’s what’s on guide popped up in each of the three hours around the quarter to mark, with a telephone guest at each of the half hours, along with a couple of competitions and the odd set piece—bingo—we were home and dry.
Round at Chris’s was a show by the people for the people and it was only a matter of weeks before members of the public started turning up asking if they could be in the audience. The thing was, we didn’t have an audience, it just sounded like we did but the more the merrier, we invited them in and more and more they continued to come. It wasn’t much longer after that we were also inviting those listeners who did come in out to party with us for the rest of the day. Very quickly this is what the show became known for—a party on the radio that spilled over into real life when the show ended. A blueprint of things to come!
Going for a drink with the audience afterwards became a regular occurrence and something we would talk about the following week on the air. The more we talked about it the more it happened and the more fun everyone was having. As I look back on things, the lines of show business and the real world were pretty much blurred from the start. We were happy to show up and more than happy to do our bit, but the thought of going home never entered our minds. We were having a blast.
Carol and I would often be the last two left standing, usually ending up in a bar near her flat. She was the most fun, full of stories and tales of adventures, often including outrageous behaviour. If she’d have been a man I’d hate to think of the number of fights she’d have got into but because she was a girl she could get away with murder.
She also had another attractive quality which I was becoming ever more aware of—she had the greatest legs I’d ever seen. And they were so long. The longer we stayed out the longer they seemed to get. Sara and I had long since split and somewhere in amongst the broadcasting, the booze and the bun fights, the thought of Carol’s legs consumed me and one day I found myself asking her if I could take a closer inspection. It was a weekday afternoon, the sun was shining and she was wearing the cheekiest of white pleated short skirts.
As in life—when it came to passion and romance with Carol, there was no holding back. She was all woman and there was no volume control. A fact to which her neighbours would no doubt testify.
The Saturday show started to get talked about for all the right reasons by all the right people. It was so uncool it became cool. We were taking London by the scruff of the neck, this was our time and it wasn’t long before the show was moved to the more prestigious Saturday morning slot.
Matthew, the boss, happy that his hunch about the quirky, ginger-haired kid from up North had paid off, decided maybe I had yet more juice in the tank and offered me an additional regular evening slot. He said he’d like a show for school kids and students that ran weekday evenings, Monday through to Thursday. As this was the exact same timeslot as Timmy had been doing in Manchester and a show I had been brought up with, I couldn’t wait to get started as I already knew the format inside out.
I called this latest show The Greenhouse and filled the studio with plants every night, I needn’t have bothered of course—this was radio, after all, but I thought it added to the on-air effect plus any guests who came to visit us would hopefully be struck by the memorable sight of a studio packed full of foliage and flora—something a little different to remember us by.
The Greenhouse was not a big ratings winner—it was never going to be—but those who did listen enjoyed it immensely: they recognised it had a heart and a purpose and was tapping into what kids needed at that time of the night. Once again we were succeeding—know your place, know who’s out there, give them what they want and sneak in a bit of what you think they might want and hope for the best. They’ll soon tell you if they don’t like it.
By this time I was living in a three-storey mews house in Belsize Park on the north side of Regents Park. It was as funky as you like with a big sliding window out from the living room on to the street and a spiral staircase from the kitchen on the ground flo
or all the way up to the bedrooms. I was renting and although it wasn’t cheap, I didn’t need my money for anything else. There was also a new car on the scene, a 1972 MK III Triumph Spitfire—I was living the dream.
Top 10 Seminal Items of Technology that Had the World Aghast
10 Eight-track car stereo system
9 LED/LCD digital watch
8 Betamax video machine
7 Spectrum ZX81 personal computer
6 Atari Home entertainment centre
5 The Sony Walkman
4 Sega Megadrive
3 Fax machine—£3,000 when they first came out and a salesman came to your house and treated you like God
2 Telephone answering machine. You could only rent them at first—£1,500 a year from BT!
1 The Squarial
As remote as I thought my chances of getting on the radio in London had been, even more remote was any idea of me appearing on television. But these were heady times for the media in general—hundreds of new broadcasting platforms were being discovered every day, new and novel ways to reach an audience and with them new opportunities to make money. Where satellite radio had failed, satellite television had now taken its place and was looking for both content and people who could provide it.
With every new technological revolution there is usually a race between two or three formats to gain supremacy. This kind of war is usually highly brutal and bloody with everyone ploughing in hundreds of millions of pounds in an attempt to kill off the competition, all of them knowing that when it comes down to it the winner takes all. It’s a game of very high stakes and big balls, not for the faint-hearted.
The two main protagonists involved in this new stream of television were Sky with their big grey dishes and BSB with their funny-looking squarials—both companies keen to get their particular receiver screwed to our walls. The key to this was buying up the rights to various programmes, movies and events that would then tempt any potential viewers to choose their package over their rivals. As part of this process
BSB decided to go one step further and create a channel for younger viewers based on the success of MTV. This new channel would be called the Power Station and was owned by a guy called Nik Powell.
Nik had made a name for himself by being one of the three men who had started the Virgin brand, the other two being a chap called Simon Draper and of course Richard Branson. After leaving the Virgin group Nik had then joined forces with the ex Beatle George Harrison and Stephen Woolley to form a venture called HandMade Films with which he had several hit movies. All things considered he was quite a guy, he also happened to be married to the 60s pop star Sandy Shaw.
Nik had heard me on the radio and thought I would be perfect to host his daily breakfast television show. It was to be two hours long and very much a radio show on the telly, with videos taking the place of records and me popping up in between to provide some sort of additional colour. He asked me in for a screen test, took one look at it, realised I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and offered me the job straight away—along with a very handy signing on fee plus a salary of £25k a year.
£25k—wowzer, this would double my annual income and sure it meant I had to work on the telly for two hours in the morning and on the radio for two hours every night, plus a few hours’ pre-production on top, but I didn’t care. I had boundless energy pumping through my veins and each new opportunity simply fired me up even more.
Two hours a day of television, having never done any before, was of course a baptism of fire, but what a way to learn—and fortunately, once again, there were very few people around to witness my mistakes—and there were plenty to witness. Although when I say my mistakes, I should say, our mistakes because guess who was producing me? Big Bird—Andy, was back on the scene, once again at the forefront of a new operation.
We had just the most fun making Power Up, which was the name of our show. We had a fully kitted out television studio and gallery to play with every day. This is where I would learn all the camera tricks, digital video effects and other television trivia that would give me a head start when it came to working on The Big Breakfast, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and TFI.
Characters were instrumental in filling the show’s content as well as getting most of the crew on camera—as there was no one else to play them. There was almost one character per link: Mystic Mick and his Magic Brick would bring us news of the future. The Man in the Kagool would mysteriously wander in and out of the back of shot, the one-string guitar guy would shuffle on and play a song every now and again and our in-house pet squirrel Martin would be berated to leave the phone alone before being unceremoniously whipped off screen via an invisible length of fishing line.
All total nonsense, all very Wayne’s World—almost exactly the same in fact, based on the premise that anything that made us laugh might make the viewers laugh. Again I found myself in the middle of an ideas-eating monster—we just had to keep those ideas coming.
The viewing figures for BSB meanwhile were dismal to say the least but the breakfast show was just about managing to register some kind of blip on the research. Nik decided to protect his biggest asset and invited me to lunch at a pub on Parsons Green in Fulham. It was called the White Horse and Nik wanted to meet me there to offer me a new deal.
‘Look Chris, we really love what you and the team are doing and we want to make sure you’re happy.’
‘Nik, I couldn’t be happier.’
‘Yes but you’ve probably heard about the figures and some of the other shows that are moving to a straight music video format as a result.’
‘Yes I have but that’s all fine, we are rocking.’
‘Well, that’s precisely it, you are rocking and we want you to know that we are 100 per cent behind what you’re doing.’
‘Great, that’s good, thanks.’
‘And that’s why we want to double what we pay you.’
Yes he really did say that. ‘We want to double what we pay you.’ What was it with these London people?
I didn’t know what to say so I said this: ‘Nik that’s really nice of you but it’s not about the money for me, it’s about taking the programme forward and seeing what we can do next.’
It wasn’t exactly what I meant but it was sort of what I meant. Of course I cared about the money but only because I’d never had any. I was far more passionate about what we were going to do on the show every day that Nik was slightly taken aback. I didn’t mean to be ungrateful but here was a guy who had just doubled this kid’s wages and the kid barely seemed to bat an eye.
Whatever emotions I had suppressed whilst sat opposite Nik in the pub that afternoon, screamed out of me as I drove home later in the day. Woohoo! In the last eighteen months my salary had gone from £15,000 a year to the princely sum of almost £70,000. What a laugh. It was time to buy a new car and how about a place to live?
Top 10 Pads
10 Terraced house in Warrington
9 Studio house in Belsize Park
8 Old rectory in Kent
7 2-bed flat in Belsize Park
6 Terraced house in Notting Hill
5 Villa in Portugal
4 Country estate in Surrey
3 Farmhouse in Surrey
2 Semi-detached house in Chelsea—I never went there, sold it to George Michael who never went there either, he then sold it to Puff Daddy, who I also think has never been there
1 Lionel Ritchie’s old house in L.A.—by far and away the coolest house I have ever owned
I went to see and fell in love with something called a studio house. It consisted of one big room with stripped wooden floors, a vaulted ceiling and a gallery bedroom. Within that room was everything except the toilet. From the bath you could watch television and from the bed you could see the bath. There was a small but perfectly formed galley kitchen, a real fire and French windows leading out onto a tiny garden. It was my fab London pad and I loved it—it was also the breathtaking sum of £105,000. The second part of the
package, my new car, was a blue 1960s Jag, with chrome wire wheels—it was to die for. Life was sweet, sweeter than sugar and honey pie, but my main focus was still on the work—that’s where my future lay. Although my fledging television days were about to come to an end.
In the race for satellite television dominance it was becoming quickly evident that Sky was going to be the bride whereas BSB was going to be the bridesmaid. BSB’s days were numbered and it was only a matter of time before it would close down and admit defeat. To add insult to injury Sky would take BSB over and even adopt part of its name.
As British Sky Broadcasting was born, my salary having recently been doubled was now double nothing. The Power Station being part of BSB had to switch off and power down. Just before midnight on the final day of transmission we all huddled together in front of the monitor in reception to have a few farewell drinks and witness the playing out of the last video. It was The Doors’ ‘The End’. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Thanks to Nik and Don Atyeo, our laid-back but brilliant Australian programme boss, not to mention all the crew who I worked with day in and day out, it was here that I had gained an invaluable education in the art of producing a low-budget, two-hour, daily television show. I still have several large boxes of video tapes to prove it, which I cherish as much as anything else I own.
You can’t buy experience like the hours I racked up on the Power Station let alone hope to get paid for doing so. And it was these same hours that would put me in pole position to host a show which intended to wake Britain up like it had never been woken up before. The Big Breakfast would be along in less than a year, but there would be more television shows, not to mention a marriage, in between.
The radio show back at GLR meantime was still flying and offers of additional work started to come my way, I remember one particular such offer, a voiceover for a McDonalds television advertising campaign. It was for several thousand pounds. I had no idea such vast sums could be earned for such little work. It was a 30-second ad that would take less than an hour of my time—but not so fast.
