by Chris Evans
‘Yeah, no man should have to make excuses for that,’ Zag could barely get his words out for laughing.
It was both hilarious and poignant at the same time and at no stage did Mick and Keiron admit to being in the room. It was a moment that will stay with me for ever. That night, for both the first and the last time, it was just the three of us.
Mick and Keiron are still the funniest things on TV anywhere in the world. They host an entertainment show back over in Ireland with their new puppets Podge and Roge, two naughty old Catholic monks—go find it, it’s all over YouTube and is as funny as anything I’ve ever seen.
Top 10 Songs Regularly Murdered at Karaoke
10 ‘Angels’
9 ‘Dancing Queen’
8 ‘American Pie’
7 ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’
6 ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’
5 ‘Love Shack’
4 ‘I Will Survive’
3 ‘Summer Nights’
2 ‘The Greatest Love of All’
1 ‘I Will Always Love You’
The Zig and Zag apartment was also the location of another extraordinary few hours in my young Big Breakfast ‘celeb’ days.
It was coming up to Christmas and I could not have been happier. I was twenty-seven years old, I was on a hit show which I loved, I was staying with the boys in their swish showbiz pad and I had just bought my first Ferrari—a Christmas present to myself.* And as if all that wasn’t enough, I was also loved up with the amazing Kim Wilde whom I was now waiting to take to the staff Christmas party.
Because of the phenomenal success of the show Gaby and I thought it only right we pay for the all of the crew to go out for a slap-up meal—it was the least we could do, the show was very much an ensemble piece, a huge team effort from which Gaby and I were turning out to be two of the main beneficiaries. We decided to hire the upstairs floor of my favourite Chinese restaurant and told the crew to eat and drink as much as they liked—tonight was on us…let the revelry commence.
It was around six o’clock on the night of the party and I was sat at home in Docklands, anxiously awaiting the arrival of my superstar girlfriend. As I had a few moments spare, I walked out onto the balcony to have a think and a cigarette. I’m not a very good smoker but I’ve always had a go and have to admit I do enjoy the odd fag now and again—usually either when I’m either really happy or really drunk—preferably both.
It was December 1993 and there I was stood out in the cold fresh air, looking over the River Thames, black and deathly swirling menacingly below, as I contemplated what the heck had happened to me in the last few years and how on earth it was that I had come to find myself in such a ridiculously fortunate, almost make-believe, position. I was living the kind of lifestyle which I had only ever seen in the movies. This was one of those surreal moments where the more you dwell on something the less you understand it. It was just beginning to really mess with my head when the phone rang and snapped me out of the need to strain my brain any longer.
I presumed it was Kim to tell me she was outside. I was half right. It was Kim but she wasn’t outside, she was nowhere near. In fact she was still at home in Hertfordshire. She was phoning to say she wasn’t coming and not only was she not coming to the party, she was never coming again. She said she had been reconsidering our relationship and had come to the conclusion that, in the long term, it was never going to work.
Well, you can’t have everything can you—where would you put it all for a start?
I have to admit, however, I was a little rocked by her announcement. Even though I, along with the rest of the world no doubt, secretly suspected I was living on borrowed time as far as being her boyfriend was concerned, I would have loved to take her out this one last time as it was such a special occasion. Having said that, I completely understood why she felt she couldn’t come. She would be turning up under false pretences and it was better to be straight with me sooner rather than later. She knew the party was a big deal for me and didn’t want to be there for the wrong reasons. I respected her for that.
After putting the phone down, and still in some degree of mild shock, my attention was immediately taken up by the need to order a taxi. Kim’s driver was going to take us to the party but seeing as she was no longer coming, neither was he, I presumed. Luckily the local taxi company had a man free and only a few minutes behind schedule I was soon on my way.
I had plenty of time to ‘grieve’ on the way there. This had been a great year and as much as I might have wanted Kim to be there to share it with us, I couldn’t let the news of the death of our relationship dictate the evening. I would go to the restaurant, tell everyone Kim was indisposed and get on with the night.
My friend Dan, a sound engineer at The Big Breakfast, called to ask where I was. I said I was en route and that Kim wouldn’t be coming but I’d only just found out, which was why I was late. Dan said it was cool and that the restaurant was filling up nicely and that everyone was in a great mood and really excited. He said he would hang on for me in the pub next door so we could have a quick pint before joining the throng.
When I arrived Dan could see something was wrong.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘Kim’s just finished with me.’
‘You’re joking,’ he said, trying not to laugh. I could see he thought it was hilarious.
‘It’s not funny,’ I said but at the same time suddenly feeling I might start laughing too.
‘Oh come on, you knew it was never meant to be. You took a chance in the tent and it paid off—well done. But you didn’t think for one second it was going to last, did you? You had no chance.’ By now Dan was rolling around on his chair he was laughing so much. Having said that, had things been the other way round I’m sure I would have found his predicament equally as amusing.
Of course he was right. I never had thought Kim and I would be together for very long but nevertheless he could have pretended, for a few minutes at least.
After two very quick pints, through most of which Dan kept bursting into laughter whilst at the same time apologising for doing so, we made our way to the restaurant. As we walked up the stairs we heard lots of loud whispering as if there were some plotting going on. We were right. As we rounded the stairs there was silence and then a crash as the karaoke machine struck up with the chorus of:
We’re the kids in America, whoah oh
We’re the kids in America, whoah oh
This was no doubt meant to be an overture to the imminent arrival of Kim and me, but upon seeing a severe lack of ‘Kim’ there was now an awkward scene to the backdrop of the continuing song.
But it was ok, Dan, still on form, declared, ‘Look everyone, it is me, Kim Wilde, and I am now a man!’
Dan’s witty line got everyone, including me, off the hook. Finally the party could get into full swing with Dan and I still the only two aware that Kim had come to her senses and dumped the ginger kid.
The evening went with a bang, in fact many bangs. It was as if we were a football team and we’d just won some championship or other. We had all worked extremely hard over the last year and now it was time to celebrate, it was going to be a long night.
The food and fizz kept on coming as did the karaoke with the usual mix of surprisingly good and ear-splittingly bad. As the party started to take care of itself I began to relax and my mind began to wander back to Kim and what might have been. I must have floated off into my own little world as after a few minutes I heard a voice saying.
‘Chris…are you OK?’ When I realised it was someone talking to me, I looked around to see who. It was Rachel sat opposite me on the same table.
Rachel, as well as being a lovely human being, also happened to be drop dead gorgeous and particularly so tonight. She was wearing a man’s white shirt, open at the collar, cuffs folded back and tied in a knot at her waist, along with a short black skirt, black tights and black shoes. This, added to the fact that she was an ex model, stood close to
six foot tall, with long blond hair and blue eyes meant she was pretty much the hottest totty in in town.
I had met her when she turned up to my radio show out of nowhere to enquire about some work experience. Who wouldn’t want a girl like Rachel around? I took her on straight away and she proved to be a real grafter.
Rachel Tatton Brown came from a military family so the work and discipline ethic was part of her make-up—maybe this is why she had felt like such a square peg in a round hole when it came to modelling. She also drank pints, one of the many attractive twists to her personality. Rachel and I quickly became firm friends and, not surprisingly, drinking buddies, but never anything more than that. Even though she was absolutely gorgeous there never seemed to be a man around. When The Big Breakfast started I put a word in and Rachel got a job answering the phones, which was how she came to be at the party.
It was typically thoughtful of her to notice that I wasn’t myself.
‘I’m OK,’ I mouthed in reply. Rachel frowned unconvinced. I smiled back as if to say don’t worry but she was having none of it. She gestured for me to leave the table and join her for a chat. We ended up in a corner of the restaurant next to the loos.
‘So come on, what’s going on with you then? There’s obviously something wrong.’
‘Alright if you really want to know, Kim’s finished with me.’
‘What?’
‘Kim’s finished with me.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Just before I came out, I was waiting for her at home and she called to say it was over.’
‘Silly woman, what did she do that for?’ she sounded almost as if she meant it.
‘What do you mean—what did she do that for?’
‘Well, where’s she going to get someone as good as you?’
I actually burst out laughing at this point—I think I even may have spat my drink.
‘Rachel, that is a lovely thing to say but she’s Kim Wilde.’ Rachel was having none of it.
‘I’m serious, she must be mad.’ Drink had obviously got the better of her.
‘Don’t be silly, Rachel.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I began to see she might be serious. ‘Alright—cards on the table, you idiot. I would love to go out with a guy like you.’
Where the heck was this conversation going?
‘A guy like me…but not me?’
‘Of course you. You included—definitely you, you would be my number one choice but you’re not interested, you never have been…’
I thought I was hearing things.
‘Not interested,’ I exclaimed, ‘I had no idea it was an option. I’ve always thought you were amazing but…’
‘But…you’ve never bloody done anything about it—why do you think I came to the radio show? Why do you think I’m always hanging about with you? I fancy the pants off you—I always have.’
At this point you could have knocked me over with a feather—a really small one from a chaffinch perhaps. Rachel was a goddess—the catch of a lifetime. She was nuclear in fanciability terms and what she had just said had left me completely stunned, although not stunned enough to see another glorious window of opportunity opening up. I seized the moment.
‘So you would go out with me?’ I recapped.
‘Yes—I—would!’ she confirmed.
‘What, right now, you would be my proper…full on…girlfriend?’
‘Yeeeesssss!!!’ she was becoming extremely animated.
I decided to challenge her. ‘Well, kiss me then…’ I was actually going to add, ‘in front of all these people,’ but I didn’t get the chance. She was in there like a shot.
Now this doesn’t happen to a guy very often, as no doubt you can imagine. Sure, I was on the rebound and admittedly by only three or four hours to be precise but now I was going out with Rachel—that was fine by me, had I known how she had felt, I would have asked her out months ago.
The other partygoers were equally as shocked as I was with regards to what was now taking place in the dimly lit corner by the loos but, hey, it was still Christmas and Christmas, as I had occasion to discover before, does funny things to people.
For the rest of the night Rachel and I were inseparable. When the whole group moved on to another party after the restaurant, we were like two kids at a school disco, we hardly came up for air. When we did it was only for a fag or a beer as well as several highly inadvisable tequila slammers dispensed by one of those mischievous hostesses who go round in a cowgirl outfit serving shot glasses from a gun belt.
This was all very well but what, I wondered, was going to happen when it came to home time. I decided to leave it up to the new boss.
‘I’m coming home with you of course,’ Rachel declared unblinkingly. She was adamant. I was ecstatic. My heart was singing. Happy Christmas!
It had been a highly unpredictable night and it wasn’t over yet. In the taxi on the way home poor Rachel started to go the whiter shade of pale that tells you maybe the tequilas were one celebration too far—their evil suddenly beginning to catch up with her. It was now not a matter of if she was going to throw up but when.
‘Can you hang on till we get home?’ I enquired.
‘How far is it?’ she managed to reply, at the risk of the inevitable.
‘About another mile,’ I said hopefully.
‘I think so,’ she moaned.
I have to say, considering the situation, her efforts in holding down whatever it was that wanted to come up were nothing short of heroic and thankfully it was only a few minutes before we arrived outside the apartment. As I went to pay the driver—Rachel staggered past me on to the grass verge by the side of the road—it was time.
‘Oh please I really need to be sick,’ she mumbled as now free to do so, something was stopping her, I was holding her up from behind but she was becoming increasingly floppy. I feared she was about to pass out so I did the only thing a newly devoted boyfriend could do. I plunged two of my fingers down her throat.
Immediately they did the trick. Rachel took no time at all in projectile vomiting all over the place and very much all over me—her new beau. Another deal had been sealed. We were in love.
Rachel stayed in the spare room that night and left early the next day, but only to return a few hours later with a bunch of clothes. This would be the first of two Christmases we would spend together.
Another fabulous woman agrees to be in my life.
* * *
* This was a huge big deal for me. I never thought for one second I would ever get such a car of my own—I paid cash for it (all the money I had in the world at the time—£47,000). On top of this, I also had to stump up the insurance premium which, because of my age and job, came in at a whacking fifteen grand a year, which I sorted out with instalments—but hey, I didn’t care.
Top 10 TV Shows
10 Magnum
9 Starsky and Hutch
8 The Two Ronnies
7 The Professionals
6 Minder
5 Happy Days
4 Tiswas
3 Morecambe and Wise
2 Noel’s House Party*
1 Swap Shop
The Big Breakfast was becoming the bigger and bigger breakfast by the programme. The day wasn’t far off when we would eventually beat the powerhouse that was GMTV in the ratings war for viewers, something that had been inconceivable just a year before. After putting the wind up the opposition, our next target was to top the two million viewer mark. Could this really ever be done at breakfast time on a channel that twelve months previously had been watched by only 100,000 people at that time? Thanks to an overwhelmingly ambitious undertaking—The Big Breakfast wedding—the answer was yes.
We ran a viewer competition for a couple to get married live on the show. The happy couple exchanged vows in the garden of the house next to a huge marquee which had been erected for the reception. Friends and family plus the whole of The Big Breakfast cast and crew made up the congrega
tion. There were tears from the girls and cheers from the boys, not to mention our bosses as advertisers flocked to book spots on what was fast becoming one of the hottest shows television had seen in the last few years.
It was around this time that Channel 4 started to think about exploiting some of the new talent they’d helped discover. Having never been a primetime player on Saturday night, they thought I might hold the key to them breaking the two main channels’ stranglehold on the slot.
They asked me if there was anything I’d like to do as well as The BB and perhaps on a Saturday night—which heralded the birth of Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush. Although not until we had produced no less than four pilots at the cost of over a million pounds.
The first pilot was an unmitigated disaster, the second not much better. Now by this point most pilots would be shelved, but the thing was that Channel 4 couldn’t walk away—they were too far in. The cost of the pilots had snowballed and there had to be something to show for it at the end. We had to keep on going until we struck oil, which eventually, thank heaven, we did. The ratings for Toothbrush reached a peak of four million, another first for the channel and for a while the show became the talk of the television world.
Now how did we come up with it again?
* * *
*I was the subject of NTV, Noel’s surprise bit when he would turn someone’s television into a camera and suddenly they would find themselves live on the air in their living room. It was his last show of the series so they upped the ante by secretly setting me up. I was still with Carol at the time, who was completely in on it, and I honestly had no idea that our whole house had been rigged up for broadcast whilst we had been out for most of the day. There is an urban myth that whilst I was lying on the sofa watching Baywatch I was caught on videotape in a compromising position due to the onscreen charms of Pamela Anderson. Although a fabulous story, unfortunately this is not at all true, but I can understand why such a tale gathered momentum. I once threw out a million-pound challenge for anyone to produce such a tape but none was forthcoming. There is a very similar story concerning an audio tape and a famous female newsreader. This ‘tape’ has also strangely never seen the light of day.
