Good Evans! Could Sara be first woman Radio2 breakfast host?
Evans leaves £1.6m contract to join Virgin minnow with 400k listeners
THERE’S a piece of advice given to Chris Evans by his late mother Minnie that must have been ringing in his ears yesterday.
She told him: ‘Earn what you can, when you can, while you can.’
Which perhaps makes it less surprising that he’s announced he is to leave Radio 2 — where he is earning £1.6 million and is the voice 8.5 million listeners wake up to every morning — to present a breakfast show on broadcasting minnow Virgin Radio for a salary that experts predict could be around £2 million.
Speaking live on air yesterday, Evans said: ‘Some of us are mountain climbers and if you get to the top of your favourite mountain and you just stay there, then you become a mountain observer. I’ve got to keep climbing, so I’m going to go and go again.’
He added: ‘It’s been quite big news in our house over the past few weeks and months. I’m going to leave Radio 2. A few weeks ago I made my mind up for sure. Since that conversation it’s been pointed out to me that I have been [here] for 13 years — which is a long time. I have absolutely loved every single moment of my time at Radio 2.’
Then came rather a flub as he added that the Breakfast show was now ‘the best it had ever been’. He quickly corrected himself, saying it was the best it had ever been while he was presenting it.
A few moments later he faced rather an embarrassing struggle to remember whether predecessor Sir Terry Wogan had been at the helm for ‘half a century’ or ‘decades’ (the correct answer is 38 years spread over two stints).
Sources say his wife Natasha has been instrumental in his decision. Evans, 52, spent last week with her and their two sons in the splendour of the Chewton Glen hotel in the New Forest, steeling himself to make his decision public.
Natasha, 38, pregnant with twins following IVF, is said to have been ‘heavily wooed’ to favour Virgin by media executive Rebekah Brooks in a months-long campaign.
Evans said he had been mulling the idea of a change for a year, and started conversations with the BBC several months ago.
Yesterday’s announcement was by prior arrangement and includes a substantial notice period — both firsts for Evans.
Twice he has walked out of radio gigs with zero notice, straight into a flurry of booze benders and lawsuits. This time, striding out of the studios with his once ginger hair now a mass of snowy streaks and the pink cheeks of a bon viveur, he looked delighted with himself.
All the talk was of what fun it was going to be. He said: ‘Our plan is: to give it all we’ve got, see where we can get to and have the most possible fun along the way.’
Significantly, the BBC did not make him any big money offer to stay. Not because they aren’t fans — sources say they are genuinely delighted with the job he has done at Radio 2 — but because in the era of #MeToo it is embarrassing to have a male radio presenter who out-earns his female counterparts by a factor of at least three.
It’s unlikely their next signing will earn as much.
And the fact is that Evans — whose ego is of a commensurate size to his talent — had even had his pay slashed.
Surely it is not coincidental that this happened at the time he says it first occurred to him that it might be time to start conquering another mountain.
In 2016, the BBC revealed he was paid £2.2 million, after being forced to disclose presenters’ earnings.
The following year this had fallen to £1.6 million as the Corporation tried to defuse a row over presenters earning huge money, a disproportionate number of them men.
Only Gary Lineker had not taken a pay cut. Evans, who had by this time quit the BBC’s revamped Top Gear and was under heavy criticism for it flopping, found his pay slashed drastically.
He sighed at the time that he left Top Gear: ‘I have had a sense of what it must feel like to be David Cameron, or a really unpopular England football manager. But you have to keep smiling and doing your job.’
At least in his new role he will feel less under the spotlight. Virgin reaches only 410,000 listeners, which means he will be being paid around £5 for every pair of ears he reaches. This, surely, must be some sort of record in commercial radio — to give a sense of scale, the most successful commercial radio station is Heart FM with 9.7 million listeners.
His new boss Rebekah Brooks is the CEO of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, which owns Virgin Radio. She said in a statement to staff: ‘ Bringing Chris into the business gives Virgin Radio the greatest opportunity to build its audience and brand with a nationally recognised breakfast show.’
He will present his last Radio 2 stint in December and start in the New Year. In October, his twins — whom he calls Ping and Pong — will be born and presumably he will take some paternity leave.
This means he may only have six to eight weeks left at the BBC, although sources said the details have yet to be hammered out.
Evans’s arrival at the Radio 2 breakfast show in 2010 caused some consternation among Wogan’s devoted fanbase, known as the TOGS (Terry’s Old Gals and Geezers). He was famous for The Big Breakfast, Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush and TFI Friday — for pranks, for sailing close to the wind and for his anarchic personality.
He had presented BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show from 1994 to 1997. He left that after a long, slow souring in which the banter with his sidekicks became increasingly bullying, and his party-hard lifestyle —– the mainstay of the show’s
He took a £600,000 pay cut at the BBC ‘He’s a petulant prima donna,’ said a judge
material —– started to take a toll on him physically.
Eventually, he demanded a fourday week and boss Matthew Bannister declined (Evans was at this time also presenting TFI Friday on TV). He resigned live on air and went out drinking.
In a sense, Evans’s latest role is a way of coming home, for within weeks of leaving Radio 1 he had joined Virgin, competing against former colleague Zoe Ball.
He went on to buy Virgin Radio from Sir Richard Branson at the
end of 1997 for £85 million. His new Ginger Media Group made him a broadcasting multi-millionaire mogul. The Ginger Media Group was sold to Scottish TV conglomerate SMG for £225 million in 2000. Evans made around £70 million from the sale, while con-tinuing to host the station’s breakfast show.
It should have been a crowning moment — but a self- destructive streak meant he embarked on a collision course with his bosses which nearly ended his career.
In May 2001, he got drunk, did not turn up for work and instead flew to the U.S. to marry teenage pop star Billie Piper, finally returning to the show two weeks later.
The following month he got drunk again and went on an infamous 18-hour drinking binge, holding court with friends while he should have been at work. He was sacked a week later.
Extraordinarily, he then sued Virgin for £8.6 million in shares which he said they should have paid him, and said he had to leave because he was ill. The company
‘I wasn’t very well behaved in those times
counter-sued him for £20 million for breach of contract. The court case that followed was seriously embarrassing for him. Evans at one point told the court: ‘If I didn’t turn up every time I got drunk I would never work for Virgin Radio.
‘I was at the end of my tether. I couldn’t go to work. I didn’t understand the situation. I was very confused. I have been drunk thousands of times and turned up thousands of times to radio shows.’
Mr Justice Lightman handed down a devastating judgment against him, calling Evans a ‘petulant prima donna’.
He observed: ‘To achieve what he wants without confrontation, he is manipulative and has resort to any means, fair or foul, to achieve his ends.’ He added that Evans was ‘given to extremes’, a ‘binge drinker’ who often presented his Virgin Radio breakfast show with a hangover and a man who, despite his ‘ confident front’, was ‘ very insecure in himself’.
After examining the evidence of medical witnesses on both sides of the case, the
‘Natasha’s the boss and it works’
judge said the DJ’s state of health in June 2001 offered no support to his claim that he was wrongfully sacked.
‘I was stupid, no doubt about that,’ Evans said later. ‘I wasn’t a very well behaved boy at those times. I was trying to figure out how come I had this brilliant career and messed it up? It was because I was an idiot — there’s no point sugar coating it.’
Evans took an 1 -month sabbatical and made a tentative return as a producer of the lame TV game show Boys And Girls in 2003.
In 2006, he was thrown a lifeline by Radio 2 when they offered him Johnnie Walker’s drive time show. He was named music radio personality of the year at the Sony Radio Academy Awards.
It was the start of a spectacular rehabilitation which saw him named as Sir Terry Wogan’s successor in 2010.
Despite complaints, listening figures went up and initiatives like the 500 Words competition, a children’s story writing contest, were hugely successful. The competition will stay at Radio 2 after Evans leaves.
By the time he took over from Sir Terry, Evans was on his third marriage and is now a family man with son Noah born in that year. Eli was born in 2012. (He also has a daughter, Jade, 31, from a previous relationship.)
His relationship with former golf professional Natasha is quite different from his unions with first wife Carol McGiffen, a TV presenter, and singerturned-actress Billie Piper.
They live together in a huge house in Ascot, Berkshire, with his collection of sports cars. He dotes on his boys and says the best thing in the world is getting home on a Friday night, giving them their tea and bath and putting them to bed.
In an interview, he said: ‘She is completely the boss and it works. I don’t like it but it works. Actually I think I secretly do like it.’ For his book Call The Midlife, he consulted with a marriage therapist who told him: ‘If you really love someone, give them more of you,’ and says that this is the key to a happy partnership.
His mother died after battling breast cancer in May, which he found devastating, and he had intimations of his own mortality after a prostate cancer scare in 2015 and a nasty dose of pneumonia over Christmas in 2016. He suffers from stressrelated insomnia, for which he has tried acupuncture.
All of these factors — plus the imminent arrival of twins which will swell his family — might make anyone more sensible think about stepping back and taking more time away from work.
Which is why even though he cannot need the money, and the challenge seems insurmountable, and the timing terrible, he has said yes.
‘That’s what I’m going to do,’ he said yesterday. ‘I’m going to go again and start a new adventure. I don’t want this to be it. I’m 52 . . . I’m going to go for it again.’