Chris Evans: riding high on the medium wave

Chris Evans rocked broadcasting's boat, a revolutionary talent seemingly
always on the brink of self-destruction. Now preparing to slip into Terry
Wogan's old slippers at Radio 2, he is a vision of settled contentment – but
is the man who lived in the fast lane really ready for the middle of the
road? By Richard Benson.

Chris Evans: can he now become a defining icon of middle-aged middle Britain?Photo: bbc/pa

7:00AM BST 26 Sep 2009

One day in the autumn of 1996, shortly after Chris Evans had begun hosting Radio 1's breakfast show, Terry Wogan invited him to his house for lunch and a round of golf. Evans was deeply impressed by Wogan. As an 'uncool' 17-year-old employee of Presto supermarket in Warrington, he had listened to his Radio 2 show driving to work.

He envied – still does – the veteran DJ's articulacy and erudition. When he walked into Wogan's home in Taplow, Berkshire, he was aware of himself thinking, 'How mad is this? I'm in Terry Wogan's house.' The first problem was the champagne. It was mid-morning, an hour after they had finished their shows. Evans never drinks before golf (nor any activity requiring concentration, including watching films on television) but felt he had to accept a glass. Likewise the second glass, likewise several bottles of wine over a cold lunch. Wogan finally took him to the golf course at 2.40pm, but after 11 holes proposed curtailing the match.

'But why, Terry?' a bewildered Evans asked.

'Because I've got a restaurant booked for us at seven,' Wogan said.

Evans, despite his reputation for late, heavy drinking, prefers early nights on work days, and spends many hours preparing shows. By 11.45pm, having lost track of the alcohol he had consumed at his host's urging, he summoned the courage to suggest they call it day.

Related Articles

'Jesus, Chris!' said an appalled Wogan. 'I thought you had a bit of stamina!'

'But we've got to prepare for the morning.'

'Preparation?' The elder statesman shook his head. 'Let me tell you something: they either like you, or they don't. Now, have another drink.'

When, earlier this month, the BBC announced that Evans would be moving from his Radio 2 drive­time slot to replace Wogan's breakfast show, many journalists and web-forum posters made their dislike of the decision very plain. With eight million listeners, Wake Up To Wogan is Britain's most popular radio programme, and Wogan himself a broadcasting institution.

Evans, on the other hand, retains a certain reputation despite recent personal and professional rehabilitations. Acclaimed as a revolutionary presenter and producer of television and radio in the 1990s, he came to be seen by critics as an embodiment of that boorish, hubristic and wealth-obsessed decade. He became Britain's highest-paid entertainer, but suffered high-profile sackings, multi-million-pound personal losses in his purchase and sale of Virgin Radio, and was described – he strongly denies this – as a liar and a prima donna by a High Court judge.

Contrary to some press implications Evans is no longer an enfant terrible – he is 43, Wogan was 34 when he took over – but can he now become a defining icon of middle-aged middle Britain? The answer, of course, may reveal as much about us as it does about him.

'It's been about 85 per cent positive in the last few days,' he says of the media reaction to the news. Press criticism doesn't hurt him, he says, because when it isn't justified they're idiots who don't know what they're talking about, and when it is – what is there to complain about? Anyway, he follows that 'brilliant' advice from Wogan: as there is nothing you can do to make the public like you, by all means try to entertain, but don't worry about being loved. The important thing is that you love them.

'A lot of people who do what I do and are loved by millions like being liked, but dislike who they are liked by,' Evans says. 'They have an image of themselves, and they don't want to be at gatherings of their fans in case the fans don't look how they want them to. The people who really like me are like my family, like the old Don't Forget Your Toothbrush audience. People who had their shirts out, maybe wore a chain, maybe had bingo wings, but came up to London to have a good time, and were happy.'

At the height of his success in the 1990s, he says, he forgot that. That was where it all went wrong.

Chris Evans lives with his wife, Natasha Shishmanian, a professional golfer, their seven-month-old son, Noah, and an alsatian, Beth, in a 17th-century house near Ascot, amid the wide roads and upscale restaurants of Berkshire's millionaire-and-celebrity belt. Just over the road is Tittenhurst Park, where John Lennon wrote and made the video for Imagine; on the gravel at the front is a Rolls-Royce, a yellow Ferrari and a black Land Rover Discovery.

When I arrive at about 11am, Evans answers the door in his dressing gown and then goes to shower and dress while Tash makes me a cup of coffee (instant) and gives me biscuits (chocolate digestives) in the kitchen.

When he comes back downstairs, he is wearing jeans, white brogues and a printed cotton shirt that will ride up to reveal the slight belly that he worries about. The famous ginger hair, like his stubble beard, has faded to pale sandy shades, and his eyes have the creases of early middle-age; with his black glasses on he looks like a faded, well-thumbed copy of an old Penguin Classic paperback.

At first, though, he can't find his glasses, and I follow him around the house and grounds as he looks for them. He breaks off to show me things: his first demo cassette, for Manchester's Piccadilly Radio, recorded in the mid-1980s; Beatles memorabilia (framed Beatles art and paraphernalia, including a copy of Lennon's birth certificate, decorates the hall along with family photographs and modern paintings), the gym/meditation room he is having built.

The spectacle-quest traverses lawns, tennis court and swimming-pool, and ends in the office abutting a garage that houses a collection of about a dozen vintage cars. The Ferrari he bought at auction for £5 million last year is here, though not, alas, the recently acquired helicopter. He has been writing his autobiography – the first volume of which, It's Not What You Think, is published by HarperCollins on Thursday – in here, looking out over the grounds. Writing and thinking.

Shishmanian, to whom he was introduced three years ago on a golf course by Ronan Keating, has both dazzled and calmed him. She is like him (loves golf, driving fast, flying the helicopter) but he has 'never been with somebody before where you get to a flashpoint and it doesn't all explode. It's not as exciting, in a perverse way, but it's more durable and workable. There are some things we don't get from each other, but that's marriage. I didn't realise that before. The more you are together, the more you realise you're an individual, and the more you accept you're an individual, the more chance you have of staying together. You get through different stages and then end up falling in love again, and that's a deeper love than you have ever felt before.'

Evans hadn't thought about children, but Shishmanian wanted them, so that was that. Now he feels like a doting father; he likes it that with children there are 'certain jokes you just can't make any more', and feels good knowing that he would give up his life for his children if need be.

He doesn't go out socialising so much any more, and doesn't drink at the awards ceremonies; he talks to Tash ('I love that, when you can just talk to somebody for two hours'), doing the Telegraph crossword with her, being with her and Noah. On a personal level he has 'very few friends. I used to try [in the 1990s] to get mates, because I'd get home and unless it was to do with work, the phone wouldn't ring. I thought maybe I wasn't the kind of person people are friends with; it didn't upset me, just amused me a bit. I don't worry about it any more.'

The twist to his experience of new parenthood is that it isn't technically 'new'. In 1987 he had a daughter, Jade, with a girlfriend called Alison in Manchester but, in his obsessive pursuit of his nascent radio career, he was so unreliable a father that Alison asked him to change or leave altogether and not see Jade. He took the latter option: 'unforgivable', he says now. He provided money, but spent 20 years hoping interviewers wouldn't mention it, suffering unbidden memories at odd moments – in the lavatory, for example, or when he was drunk.

It 'took the joy out of things', he says. It 'stultified' him. His mother, Minnie, a self-sacrificing woman whose husband died when Evans was 14, and who did two jobs to support the family, brought him up with a strict do-right moral code, yet here he was not even seeing his own daughter. As he became successful, he felt close to having everything – but not having sorted that out meant it came to nothing. 'If you have a lie in your life,' he says, 'or even just something you haven't squared, then you have to lie in everything. Because you can't be honest. You don't want to get to that point where you draw on that emotion.'

He got back in touch and was fully reconciled with his daughter last July. And now Jade – 'a gorgeous person, and her mum is amazing' – comes down to London to visit him, and he feels as if 'the weight of the entire solar system has been lifted. Now, nobody can knock on my door tomorrow and tell me something I don't know about myself.'

Chris Evans was born on April 1 1966 and grew up on a council estate in Warrington, Cheshire, the youngest of three children. His father, Martin, was an NHS wages clerk, Minnie a nurse who, when she was on night shifts and looking after the family, lived on three hours' sleep a day. Both were older than his peers' parents, and they revered their children. His father never hit them; Minnie, even as a single parent, bought Chris a Mini for his 17th birthday.

Evans clearly reveres Minnie. When we meet again, this time in a Soho hotel near the Radio 2 studios, his voice thickens, and his lips involuntarily twitch when talking about her – and I wonder if parental indulgence may have given him his apparent confidence and resistance to authority figures. At his grammar school he despised the teachers for hitting the boys, and at 14 walked out after punching a teacher; it also prefigured adult clashes with most managers he has had, from the Warrington newsagent he worked for as a school leaver to, perhaps most notoriously, Matthew Bannister, his controller at Radio 1.

Suspicious of what he calls 'psychobabble', Evans entertains the idea reluctantly. 'It's far too easy to make those conclusions,' he says a little wearily, taking a sip of gin and tonic. 'And to be honest, I'm not particularly interested. But I think you're right. With the grammar school teachers, I thought, how dare you? How dare you? My dad doesn't say or do things like that to me! And if he did I'd be crying my eyes out for two weeks, so who do you think you are?'

Independent of authority-resentment, he has since he was a teenager had a semi-permanent feeling of anger that can well up at almost any time. He has smashed up a kitchen, and on another occasion an entire studio flat, in an attempt to make the woman he was rowing with 'understand how angry I was'. At other times, its expression is almost comic: walking alone through London's parks, he can work himself into a fury at people who fail to appreciate them. He also suffers from nightmares almost every night, including one in which his head falls off. He doesn't know where any of this comes from, but therapy doesn't appeal: 'I'd think, what else can I spend that hour doing? What can it give me? And I don't think I'm a bad person.'

It seems striking that he mentions not being 'a bad person', given that he made his reputation by being controversial and challenging. He mentions three times in the course of our meetings that he often feels he is being judged, and that he doesn't really like it much. It is one of several paradoxes that emerge out of what is, one has to say, unusual frankness in an interviewee.

He tells me, for instance, that he used to walk naked around the offices of his Ginger Media company, because he thought it was funny, and 'so many things can happen when you get naked', and yet he feels un­comfortable being naked in the bath with Noah ('I don't know why. I know it's a bit weird. I haven't got my head around that one to be honest'). His well-documented friendliness and enthusiasm for life seems at odds with the angry person fuming about parks; the one impossible thing he would love to do is experience the world through someone else's consciousness – and yet he isn't much interested in exploring his own with therapy.

Leaving his second senior school after a brief stay in the sixth form, he wanted decent money ('because we never had any. It's simple') and a career in radio; he still seems faintly bemused by the fact that the two might coincide. Starting at 18, he progressed through various jobs and the junior ranks of 1980s commercial radio at Piccadilly Radio; he ended up in London at the start of the 1990s, and moved through more TV and radio stations to get his really big break as a presenter on Channel 4's The Big Breakfast in 1992.

In 1994 he left The Big Breakfast and formed a production company, Ginger Productions. His first show, Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, was a hit for Channel 4 and was in some ways a new kind of TV, full of stunts, pop-culture references, zany games and, of course, Evans himself. He instinctively understood how, in order to hold an audience's attention, broadcasting in the 1990s would need to be louder, quicker, less predictable, more intense.

In 1995 that understanding attracted Radio 1, which recruited him for its flagship breakfast show. He attracted complaints and controversy there, but also increased ratings with his quick, witty style and slots (sample selection: Stick Your Tongue In, On the Bog) and was described in the media as 'the station's saviour'.

Was he a revolutionary genius, as he was sometimes described at that time? Yes and no. He points out that in part he just brought the energy, intensity and attention to detail of the new local commercial radio stations of the 1970s and 1980s; his biggest early influence was Timmy Mallett, whose remarkable quickfire Piccadilly show, drawing on his in-studio team, Evans had worked for in the 1980s.

'I was just a really good producer, and the right person at the right time,' Evans says. 'And I had the right upbringing, although that was also the reason I f***ed up.'

The f***-up began with TFI Friday, Ginger Productions' Channel 4 show featuring live music, interviews and memorable slots (Freak or Unique, Will: Pub Genius). It launched in 1996 and, being a music show, it was cool. 'And I thought, oh, I like this audience – they're cool. But they didn't like me – they just wanted to be on the show. I had never been cool, but I suddenly thought I was something I wasn't. And I didn't know how to do it.'

Looking back at old clips, it is clear that he was less comfortable interviewing, say, Jarvis Cocker than he had been interacting with the Toothbrush audience, but no one noticed this.

At the same time he had begun chucking his weight around at Radio 1, criticising his boss on air, telling adult jokes, turning up late, and on one occasion not turning up at all after a bacchanalian Christmas party the previous night. Radio 1 agreed to let him start work half an hour later, but parted company with him in early 1997 after Evans asked for Fridays off. Richard Branson then recruited him to Virgin Radio after a courtship that, among other episodes, saw Branson taking a Concorde flight Evans was on so that they could talk terms.

After taking on the Virgin breakfast show and dramatically boosting the audience figures, Evans pulled off an incredible deal to buy Virgin Radio. Suddenly he controlled a company worth more than £85 million – and found, perversely, that the money made him both hubristic and nervous. Previously he had more or less spent the hundreds of thousands that he earned, just as he spent his wages as a paper boy. 'But when it becomes all those millions, then it begins to worry you. What should I do with it? What if something goes wrong and I lose all that. Suddenly you can't enjoy it.'

As breakfast show presenter and boss, he tripled the station's value in two years, and then, in March 2000, sold Ginger Media Group (which included Virgin Radio and Ginger Productions) to the media conglomerate SMG for £225 million, a deal that took his fortune to £87 million and made him Britain's best-paid entertainer.

It was shortly afterwards that Evans began his relationship with the then 18-year-old actress and singer Billie Piper, whom he had met when she appeared on TFI. Overworked and underperforming sales-wise, Piper had anorexia and an increasing reliance on sleeping pills. Evans was drinking too much (drinking bouts undertaken by himself, Piper and his friends Danny Baker and Paul Gascoigne became regular tabloid subjects) and he had become, he says, blasé, 'an abuser of money, people, sex, alcohol and my job'.

He provided wisdom, Piper renewed his wonder; the relationship, he says, was a 'million per cent mutual rescue', based on 'her innocence and my experience. No one of my age understood me, and no one of her age understood her. Together we were brilliant for each other.'

In May 2001 he and Piper married at Las Vegas's Little Church of the West. For a while they lived in Los Angeles, where Piper took acting lessons and Evans began a period of reflection and reading (in the 1990s he unashamedly told interviewers he had barely read any books; the top 10 inspiring books listed in his autobiography takes in Dickens, Hemingway, self-help, and philosophers including Bertrand Russell and Marcus Aurelius). Returning to London, he hooked up Piper with his agent, and she got the role of Rose in the BBC's revived Dr Who.

She began filming away in Cardiff, and they came apart. 'We were best mates, but it couldn't have gone any other way. She was 22, I was 38. Once she was settled, she wanted to be with her mates and do the stuff she had never done, but I couldn't do that, wasn't interested. I said she must go and do it. We got upset because we loved each other, but a few weeks later we understood. My exact words were, "If I get married again, you have to cheer louder than anybody else at my wedding, and if you get married, I have to cheer louder than anybody at yours." And that's what happened.'

Piper has re-married (to the actor Laurence Fox) and had a child, and the two couples visit each other; they recently celebrated Evans's wedding anniversary at his home. Before they married Shishmanian asked about the relationship, and he told her ('best mates'). It turned out Fox and Piper had had a similar conversation. 'I told Laurence, it's cool, don't worry,' Evans says. 'Bill is one of the few people I trust with everything I've got. There aren't many people you can say that about.'

While he was with Piper, Evans had gone on a three-day drinking binge after a disagreement with his bosses at Virgin. Since selling the station his relationship with managers had soured, and he had become sloppy with his other projects. The breaking point came when he didn't turn up for work for six days, claiming to be ill, but going to the pub near his house where he was photographed by press photographers. The new owners of Virgin fired him for breach of contract and withheld share options. He sued for unfair dismissal, and after the long legal process, in 2003 he lost the case, and the judge attacked his character in court. His losses have been reported at various amounts north of £20 million.

While this was happening he had also set up a new production company, UMTV. By 2006 he was – and is – still running UMTV, but had returned to the BBC, winning awards and publicly thanking the Beeb for 'the second chance'.

He nurses some regrets from the bad time, the biggest being not having produced films when he was in a position to be able to. Making movies is his ultimate ambition. He is paid a reported £540,000 for his drivetime radio show and has between £20 million and £30 million in the bank (much of the fortune went in court costs and collapsed share prices: the week we met he sold his last Virgin shares for £261,337; they were once worth £37 million).

At the end of our last meeting, I drive with Evans in his Ferrari from his house to the Radio 2 studios. Berkshire zips past, glittering in the early afternoon autumn sunshine, and I wonder: the crosswords, the baby, Radio 2 and big houses are all very nice, but doesn't it somehow feel less like being in the crucible of things like he used to be?

'Well,' he says, 'it's age isn't it? If you're in your mid-twenties to early-thirties, if you're allowed, you can write or speak for the world, because that's your generation's time. After that, you can still write or create for your generation – but don't think it has the same validity, because your time is over, my friend.'

Do you feel like that now? 'Totally, 100 per cent. It's a bit sad. But it's about acceptance. If you accept it – rock'n'roll, let's go again. On those first shows I did, like Toothbrush, I was my audience. And I am my audience again now. I might have a big flash car and a big house and all this kind of stuff, but I can completely…'

His own words running away with him, he pauses, and suddenly he seems to be talking with a defiant pride. It isn't frightening, but it almost sounds like anger. We join the big, busy road leading into London, traffic flowing all around us.

'I mean anybody can come on that phone tonight, from Keswick or Kazakhstan or wherever, and I can talk to them for 15 to 20 minutes. No problem at all. Just me and them. Having a chat.'