Dig out our Lycra – he’s back!
... and more gloriously bonkers than ever. In an uproarious audience, TV’s Mr Motivator has some VERY colourful views about his former co-stars
YES, I know exactly what you are thinking. What on earth happened to GMTV’s Mr Motivator, the unitard-wearing keepfit fanatic who got viewers moving in the Nineties?
Back then he was known for his bum-bags and colourful Spandex outfits, plus the cheery catchphrases he would shout while urging us to shake it out, step it up and move it on.
‘Be happy!’ he would cry. At moments of supreme audience participation, he would demand: ‘Everybody say yeah!’ And people did, because they loved him. At the peak of his success, the Jamaicanborn exercise instructor appeared regularly with all the breakfast television greats: Richard and Judy, Lorraine Kelly, Anthea Turner, Eamonn Holmes, Mr Blobby.
‘Ah, they were wonderful days,’ he says. ‘But you know, the only sincere one among them is probably Lorraine. She sees you and she cuddles you. The rest of them are not people who get on the phone to you, call you up and check how you are.’ That is sad, I say. ‘It is,’ he agrees. After his GMTV heyday, Mr Motivator, AKA Derrick Evans, moved back to Jamaica in 2003, where he ran an eco-tourism centre. Now he is making a comeback with a BBC fitness special, but he is appalled at the turn television has taken in his absence.
‘All this shouting and screaming,’ he says, of bear-pit programmes such as The Jeremy Kyle Show and the more bellicose moments on reality shows such as Big Brother.
‘What has happened? There has been such a big change in tone. People seem to be quite happy laughing at others, it has become a spectacle. A camera in a room with people making a fool of themselves and being obnoxious? Where is feel-good television? Where is the love?
‘We have to stop laughing at the nasty stuff and quality needs to return,’ he says, adding: ‘I think that part of the problem is that have never been replaced.’
HIE SAYS this because whether in or out of the gym, he doesn’t believe in criticism or negativity such as fat-shaming, only encouragement.
‘It is wrong because you don’t know if there is a medical reason, or whether it is a choice that person has made. We should leave people alone. We should be kind,’ he says.
We meet in a Manchester hotel, where Motivator is worried that I’m disappointed because he is not wearing Lycra. Instead, he is dressed in jaunty African-print trousers, a matching cap, a T-shirt with ‘I’m Awesome!’ emblazoned on the front, red Reebok trainers and his usual mismatched socks.
‘Why should socks match? Too much stress,’ he says, with a wave of the hand.
Aged 66, he is still trim and fit, moving with the agility of a much younger man. The only flaw in his superstructure is his right knee, which cracks when he stands up or sits down. This is the legacy of an injury he incurred in 2014 while training for the short-lived BBC gymnastics show Tumble. ‘I dislocated my right knee and ripped my patella tendon,’ he says.
Despite this, he still works out every day and does 66 press-ups, one for each year, before bed.
‘I have more muscles now. I love looking in the mirror. I love me!’ he roars.
He lives nearby with his adored third wife, Sandra, whom he calls Mummy. ‘Well? She calls me Daddy,’ he shrugs, when I look surprised. He says they have never had an argument in the 30 years they have been together and that she doesn’t even mind his ‘hundreds’ of unitards stashed under the bed in plastic bags.
‘I have never had to say, “Mummy I am sorry”,’ he insists.
Despite not being on television for many years, he has managed to make a living out of being Mr Motivator: as a motivational speaker, as a fitness coach on Saga cruises and as a popular stage turn at summer festivals.
In 2016, he wrote an autobiography called The Warm Up, which detailed his often troubled life; being abandoned by his mother as a baby, his three wives – he has a child with each one – and his long periods of penury. It all makes his irrepressible cheeriness even more astonishing.
‘I don’t forget where I come from. I don’t forget stacking shelves in Tesco. I don’t forget cleaning toilets in Lidl stores, I don’t forget being homeless and living in a B&B full of rats. That is what made me who I am,’ he says.
As a young man he lived in North London, studying marketing, keen to better himself and always on the lookout for an opportunity.
TRANSFIXED the first time he walked into a fitness studio and saw people doing aerobics, he decided keep-fit was his way forward. After hanging around the GMTV studios for weeks, he finally got himself on air by telling the station’s boss that he ‘needed to lose his belly’. Fat-shaming can, you see, have its positive side.
For a while, Motivator was Eamonn Holmes’s personal trainer, perhaps not the easiest of tasks. ‘He used to come around my house and eat all my food!’ he says. What, all of your biscuits?
‘Everything. He’d go through the cupboards. He had a lot of emotional issues back then,’ Mr Motivator says of the curmudgeonly broadcaster from Belfast.
‘Then we fell out because a newspaper said I called him “Fatty”. I never did! But he hasn’t spoken to me for years because of that.’
He despairs at his former charge’s ballooning weight and recent operation to have both his hips replaced. ‘All that could have been avoided,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘If Eamonn had only listened to me, he’d still have his hips.’ He is still evangelical on the subject of fitness. He tells our photographer he should get kneepads ‘if you are going to go around kneeling on cold floors like that’. He is thrilled at the physical improvements he has made to the older cruisers on the Saga ships. And he is always searching for ways of improving the fitness of others. ‘Take you, for example.’ Let’s not. ‘Look at the way you sit down, Jan. Don’t flop and collapse like that. Sit down and stand up properly using your muscles.’ He shows me how to do this, and we stand up and down half a dozen times. Get wicked! He says I need a stress ball to alleviate a problem with my right hand. Posture is key. ‘Stop looking at the floor,’ he barks. ‘Put an orange between your shoulder blades and gently squeeze the juice out of it.’
Is this an imaginary orange?
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Now squeeze.’
He tells me his wife is not the shape she was when she was in her mid-30s, but she exercises, keeps fit and loves herself.
He cheers up just thinking about her and he smells heavenly, courtesy of the body lotion she cooks up especially for him – a mixture of Vaseline, lavender and tea tree oil which she boils in a saucepan and then bottles.
He laughs when he says they have only drunk alcohol once, when they bought a bottle of Sanatogen because they heard red wine had health benefits. ‘The headaches were terrible; we never tried again,’ he says, of the powerful fortified tonic.
He also says sex is not as important as it once was. He reveals: ‘When you get to a certain age, the loss of desire creeps up on you. All these older celebrities who say they are having lots of sex, they are lying though their teeth!
‘We have wonderful memories, but that is all. Mummy and I hold hands, we kiss, but sex is not the be-all end-all.’ For the first and
hopefully last time ever in an interview, I ask: ‘When was the last time you had sex with your Mummy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he cries, fishing in his pockets for his phone. ‘Let’s ring her up and ask her.’
Let’s not, I shriek, distracting him with some more orange exercises. The Motivators moved to Jamaica when their daughter, Abigail, developed asthma as a child.
Now they are back in Britain to support her, following a diagnosis of type 1 adult diabetes.
‘Her pancreas is shot,’ he says of Abigail, who is a student at Lancaster University.
He is raffling off his €1.8million home and business in Jamaica, planning to settle permanently in the UK. Tickets are available online for £23 (€27) and he needs to sell 50,000 of them for the project to succeed.
When I suggest that such raffles rarely work, he says he is hopeful that this one will because he wants the mansion to be won by an ‘ordinary person’.
During his Jamaican absence, the keep-fit world has also changed irrevocably. Smooth operators such as Joe Wicks and Matt Roberts now lead the way with healthy diets and sciencebased fitness routines.
It all seems a long way from the innocence of yesteryear on breakfast TV, with Mr Motivator, Mad Lizzie and the Green Goddess Diana Moran doing weights with bags of sugar.
‘What do we all remember about the Green Goddess? Only that she was green. Nothing else. I never did her exercises and I never met anyone who did,’ he says.
That’s what I love about Mr Motivator. Despite his pleas for feelgood television and kindness to all, he’s actually rather bitchy. Get wicked!