by Chris Evans
And you, Chris Evans, are one of a handful of people (by my reckoning there are five) who made the life I enjoy possible, by showing me what happened if you reached down into the depths of yourself and settled for nothing else than giving your absolute all and bringing out the best of everybody around you each and every day.
I first met you in October 1989. A very nice man called Trevor Dann had helped me organise a debate entitled ‘Rock and Roll Has Lost Its Balls’ at The Oxford Union in the summer of 1988.
In October 1989 I called him out of the blue on the pretext of finding out how to get on record companies white label mailing lists to help my job as a nightclub DJ. The banks and consultancy firms had stopped coming to universities to hire 21-year-olds like me that year because of Norman Lamont’s Black Monday, and I had always kind of known that that kind of job wasn’t for me anyway.
Trevor said, ‘Come down to GLR. Have a look round and see what you think.’ I did and during my tour he said, ‘I want you to meet somebody. He’s from up north. He’s Emma Freud’s producer and I think he’s going to become a huge star. He has his first show for us on air tonight and I need somebody to answer his phones.’
You looked up and said ‘Hi’. That’s all you said. Nothing else. I hung around slightly in awe of where I was and who we shared our office with ( Janice Long, Johnnie Walker, Emma Freud and Nick Abbot). When you went on air that night at 7.30 I fell headlong in love. With you, with the idea you could do this thing for a living and with the adrenal pleasure hit of answering a phone, prepping a caller and hearing them on air 30 seconds later.
I had to go back to university nine months later and cram my degree in. You’re weren’t too happy about that I know. And I got pretty fucked off with you when I couldn’t get a job on Power Up in Heathman’s Yard after my finals. But I had my life and you had yours and I always think that’s why we were so good for each other.
Cut to January 1992 and I had just landed my first TV job at Planet 24 as development writer. Charlie Parsons passed by my desk, a whir of frenzied energy and said, ‘Channel 4 are going to launch a breakfast show. You need to write one’.
So, like a 24-year-old chimpanzee with an Amstrad 9512, I did. It was the show we did on GLR mixed with Simon Mayo’s brilliant breakfast show on Radio 1 and my favourite TV show as a kid, Tiswas. I told Charlie it was a bit like ‘zoo radio’: the Howard Stern Show I had listened to when I was visiting a friend in New York.
Charlie had thought of the house and Bob Geldof had thought of the title The Big Breakfast. And I always remember them looking at me as they read the first bits of paper and saying, ‘But who on earth can do this?’
I said, ‘Well there’s a guy I answered phones for at GLR.He’s called Chris Evans.’ You know I didn’t know anybody else then, it was just instinct. If they had said somebody else more famous I probably wouldn’t have said much. I was very naïve. I figured everybody in this incredible world of television, radio and magazines was as excellent as you.
You met Charlie and although you were the hottest name in town (I subsequently discovered you were on pretty much every C4 breakfast slot proposal) you shook hands with him and said ‘yes’.
Do you remember that summer of 1992 auditioning for your co-host? Endless run throughs whilst that house was being built? The noise of saws and stuff drowning the shows we were shooting on little hi-8 cams? The final three were the gorgeous Joanna Kaye, Gaby Roslin and the then unheard of model booker and party organiser, our friend Davina McCall.
When the Big Breakfast team was assembled I became the researcher on Friday’s show. I sat at home and watched the very first show on the Monday the BB launched. I cried all the way through. Oh my God. We had all done it! And you could feel every day the country switching on to this thing. You heard it on the Tube and in the pub, and you saw it in the newspapers and then six weeks in you and Gaby were on This Morning being interviewed by Richard and Judy and we all knew we had arrived.
We parted again when you went upstairs to do Toothbrush. I didn’t feel that mad I wasn’t part of that gang—simply because I knew we were different and had separate lives.
And I am so sorry for standing on my dignity for too long. The Saturday I brought my first born Louie home from the hospital in November 1997 I sprinted to the 7/11 on the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to buy a lottery ticket (I realized I was the luckiest man in the world and tonight was my night) and we ran smack into each other, knocked each over and picked ourselves up, turned away and said nothing.
Sorry. That still shames me.
You know what? I’ve been really lucky. I’ve had the most incredible time working with some of the most talented people in the world of television, but it all started with you. And that silly little show The Greenhouse on GLR. That’s where you taught me how to do it.
And when we saw each other last week and you asked me to write this bit for your book, I was glad. Truly, truly glad. To be able to say thank you. For the record. Thank you Chris Evans, for everything.
NAME: Suzi Aplin
10 things you may not know about Chris Evans
He is the only person I know who can make a Ramsay-standard concoction with the following five ingredients: one tub (yes, a whole tub) of Philadelphia (and, crucially, not the Light alternative), one can of tomatoes, one lemon, one onion and one clove of garlic—all thrown together with penne cooked al dente. Oh, and heaps of black pepper. It’s delicious. Trust me, I’ve challenged many a supreme cook to try their hand at this and they have, without exception, failed.
Bono’s nickname for him is Elvis.
He is an annoyingly gifted games supremo—I’ve never known him be defeated by a crossword, he’s dynamite at Boggle, fearsome at Trivial Pursuit and legendary at Articulate. Though when it came to Scrabble, I trounced him every time.
He is more at ease naked than any man or woman I know—without question, his best ideas come when he is free from the constraints of clothes. In fact, nudity often leads to more nudity—the infamous Naked Parade that ran for a long spell on TFI Friday came about when, locked in the bathroom for an hour after some heated discussion or other, he emerged steaming from the room, proud and bare, with a lampshade propped upside down on top of his head.
He pretty much accomplishes anything he turns his hand to…perhaps failure is not an option. Three alternative careers I think could have been his if he’d set his heart on it: 1. Concert pianist. 2. Michelin-starred chef. 3. Golf pro.
On the flipside, he is a totally rubbish swimmer.
He is extraordinarily, wonderfully, sometimes stupidly, generous—with sharing, with embracing, with loving. He seizes the moment and all it encompasses—lost souls, dangerous strangers, mad adventures, ridiculous challenges—like no one I’ve ever known. If you’ve not yet been bought a drink by him, your time will come. He will find you eventually. And you will have a wonderful night.
He never washes his hair but it is always clean. In six years I never saw a drop of shampoo get within a mile of him. Is that weird? Is he onto something he should be bottling?
His initial attempts at a rendition of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ for Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush were so painful they would have prompted tears from Mick Jagger. Jools Holland had to momentarily leave the rehearsal room. He got there in the end, of course, and pulled it off proudly on the actual night, but the rehearsal tape remains safely locked up in a TV vault somewhere—I’m not sure the time would ever be right for public consumption. He later went on to make a TFI Friday special with The Rolling Stones—it was a huge coup and I was never sure if word had reached Mick of Chris’s passionate homage.
This list could go on forever—it’s impossible to narrow it down to ten. So instead, I’ll just sum up by saying that when you are sharing his air space—be it as friend, partner, colleague or fleeting, passing stranger—you absolutely believe that anything is possible. Growing old is mandatory but growing up is optional. Chris’s mantra is that life is
incredibly short and an absolute gift, and as such must be grasped tightly because every single second counts. With this comes inevitable risk and danger, but wow, it’s always an adventure. With him I experienced some of the most outrageous, insane, bizarre, scary and occasionally dark moments. But I also had the most fun, exciting, blissful, loving, funny and unbelievably happy times with this fireball of a human, and I wouldn’t swap any of it for a moment. A lifetime of amazing memories—and who could ever wish for more than that?
NAME: Michael Gates
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in.
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.
Philip Larkin
Summer 1987. Ainsworth, near Bolton, Lancashire. Chris, 21, and living in a tent in our back garden, has hired a video camera for the day and got me to film him in a demo for the BBC. It’s the first time he has ever appeared on screen. Listening to his running order in my tiny bedroom at The Old Vicarage I realise for the first time that he is a genius, but somehow cannot bring myself to tell him.
I have known him since Tony Ingham, Programme Controller at Piccadilly Radio, asked me to show ‘some 16-year-old kid from hospital radio’ (not true—he had never set foot in a studio) how the station works. I still see him clearly sitting on the sofa outside the control room with wiry dark red hair, set off by a white and turquoise DJ-style jacket. Goggly eyes. Specs. I discover he has never eaten rice.
Our demo starts with a wobbly hand-held close-up of an alarm clock ringing (Big Breakfast?), then cuts to his sleeping wedge-shaped head: my Anglo-Saxon tutor at Oxford believed that such heads are always the most intelligent. He opens his eyes, and a new day dawns.
I am now filming him driving his old white Ford Escort as he talks straight to camera about why he should be on TV. ‘Let’s see what’s on the radio’ he says, pressing the button with a flourish. Supernaturally on cue ‘There’s no business like show business’ blurts out of the tinny loudspeaker.
Accidents always seem to happen around Chris. Twists of fate—both lucky and unlucky. He believes in karma. The unlucky twists are easiest to remember: the gas explosion next to his car; the woman pouring a cup of tea over his head before the lights had changed as he sat in his MG; the swarm of flies buzzing out of his maggot box when we went fishing; the botulism from a tin of tuna that nearly killed him on-air; the Bob Geldof interview he recorded over; Bryce Cook’s taped Sunday religious show spiralling onto the studio floor seconds before due to be broadcast…
And the video? Does this historic piece of film hold pride of place on his bookshelf? Can you find it on YouTube? Is it in the ‘Don’t-Call-Us-We’ll-Call-You’ file, gathering dust in Broadcasting House?
No. None of these. ‘Someone nicked it from the back-seat of the car’ he told me a few days after we made it, with a shrug and a laugh.
There were even louder laughs when, not long after, another Piccadilly Programme Controller, Mike Briscoe, halved his modest salary. Partly my fault, so I was feeling pretty guilty. ‘He must have been really really angry,’ Chris explained as he held Mike’s letter up to the window. ‘You can see the light through the holes where he typed the full-stops.’
Summer 1990. Oxford town centre. A man slumped on the street asks us for money and claims to be P.J. Proby, the trouser-splitting 60s pop star, fallen on hard times. Chris gives him some and muses on fame and fortune, as is his wont. The downs stimulate him as much as the ups. Particularly the slender twists of fate that separate one from the other.
Strange. DJ-ing can be a frothy, shallow, brainless business. But the unknown Christopher James Evans is as deep as they come. The big philosophical questions are what, at heart, drive him. ‘What are days for?’ Larkin asks. Chris, I think you know better than most.
NAME: Jade, Chris Evans’s daughter
What was it like having Chris Evans as your dad?
It’s hard to explain. I used to get asked that question all the time, amongst other things such as, do you hate him? Does he send you millions of pounds for your birthday? Which I’d then reply with no, why would I hate somebody I didn’t know?
Some people say I’ve missed out on having a dad but what would they know? How could I miss something I’ve never had?
The first time I met my dad I had mixed emotions. I was obviously nervous. Would we get on? Would he like me? Would he want to see me again? But as soon as I met him he put me at ease. He is so easy to get on with and there weren’t any awkward silences that I’d imagined there may have been.
My dad is one of the nicest, caring and generous people I have ever met. He can make a conversation with anybody and never fails to make people smile. I couldn’t be happier that we have made contact and are now building on our father-daughter relationship.
Not only have I gained a great dad but I’ve also gained an amazing family too, who have made me feel welcome and loved like I’ve always been a part of it.
Things happen the way they do for a reason and it doesn’t matter if its taken my dad and I a bit longer to get to know one another than it maybe should have, at least we’ve got there.
NAME: Danny Baker
It’s incredible to imagine now but when I first met Chris he was barely nine years old. No, hang on, I just looked it up and he was actually twenty-one. Indeed, now I think about it, ‘nine’ was a lazy and ridiculous guess at his age in 1988. I apologise for that and promise you I will give more thought to the rest of this entry. Still, wouldn’t that have been something, eh? Me, at thirty-one, hanging out with a nine-year-old radio producer? People would say, ‘Is that kid producing your hit radio show?’ And I’d say, ‘Yep.’ And they’d say, ‘Well, how old is he?’ And I’d go, like, ‘Nine.’ And there he’d be, all concentration and tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth, cueing up terrible records and shouting at the phone answerers.
No, Chris, as I’m sure you’ve already read, was born in 1966. What he may have been too abashed to tell you is that at just three days old he was already all set to make national headlines when, after briefly going missing, he was found behind a hedge by Pickles the dog. Sadly this story was knocked off the front pages when, just half an hour later, Pickles also found the recently stolen World Cup and nobody cared about the red-headed baby angle any more. But his time would come.
So, back to 1988 when our combined ages were just forty. I had never been in a radio studio before and was asked if I was OK with handling the phalanx of dials, knobs and levers that would somehow give my audio creature life. Swallowing something hard and jagged, I told them that I was from TV and all you had to do there was stare at a glass rectangle and yodel. A muted internal phone call was made in which, I believe, the phrases ‘milquetoast’ and ‘big Jesse’ were used.
Within minutes help had arrived, as in bounded a long streak of electricity wearing Buddy Holly’s glasses and Rufus the Red’s spare toupee.
‘Hello!’ he boomed in a strangulated screech, ‘I’m Chris Evans. Look, working this desk is simple—you just…’ And then he proceeded to morph into Squiddly Diddly the cartoon octopus as he simultaneously tweaked, faded, balanced, equalised and cued about eighty things at once. Two minutes later he stopped. ‘Got that?’ he said. I whimpered that I might need him to ‘stick around during the first show…’
For the next few months we had a completely magnificent time inventing each other and tearing jagged, boss-eyed raucous radio straight out of the ether.
At the time of my debut on GLR I had already been on TV in London for about eight years. After about our third show, Chris and I decamped across to The Rising Sun pub and as we stood at the bar, holding a five-pound note aloft and bellowing that we were not leaving until we had spent it all up, a couple ca
me across and asked if I was Danny Baker. After ascertaining that they weren’t creditors I confirmed their suspicion. They then asked for my autograph which I, as is my style, proceeded to furnish in the most flamboyant script. Happy with this, they then backed away from us, complete with touches to imaginary forelocks.
Chris was absolutely astounded.
‘Wow!’ he said all flushed. ‘Wow! What the fuck does that feel like?’
It turned out he had no idea that I was regionally, partially famous. He seemed knocked out to actually know someone, really know someone, who signed up to three autographs a month.
His eyes jangled in their sockets. A sort of heavenly choir played trombones inside his head. His mouth flooded with the ambrosia of ambition. I could see there and then that he wanted some of that. He threw back his head and howled a long laugh of excitement at the moon. This, he finally felt, was really going to happen.
The kicker part to this minor tale of self-regarding nonsense is that if you jump forward a decade from this incident you will see countless tabloid photographs of Chris leaving both murky dives as well as some of the smartest venues in the capital and there, lagging in the gloom behind him, is what at first glance appears to be a fat old tramp looking for a handout. In the countless captions and articles that accompanied these shots documenting Chris’ daily adventures this individual was rarely given a name but usually contemptuously referred to as simply ‘one of Chris Evan’s bootlicking entourage looking to glean some reflected glory…’
And that, my friends, is as good a guide to the giddy roulette wheel of show business as I can offer you.
