Yes, I used to shout. But I’m not a bully
In a no-holds-barred interview on the eve of the new Top Gear series, Chris Evans talks about smear stories, hair growth pills — and what he REALLY thinks of Clarkson
‘Is our Top Gear as good as the old one? I think so’ ‘So I crashed a car, I don’t care. I ran out of talent. And road’
TOP Gear is back on BBC2 tomorrow night, just over a year after Jeremy Clarkson was fired for punching a producer who hadn’t arranged hot food after a long day’s filming. Chris Evans was announced (or more accurately announced himself) to great fanfare as Clarkson’s successor, after which he was bombarded with bad publicity as everything imaginable seemed to go wrong.
First he pranged a luxury Jaguar during filming. Then he was ill all over the Monterey race track in California after suffering a nasty case of travel sickness in an Audi R8 V10.
Next it was reported he couldn’t talk to camera while he drove — a skill up there with breathing, swearing and smoking for a Top Gear presenter.
Then there was the disastrous stunt near the Cenotaph in London, where American co-presenter Matt LeBlanc appeared to be perfecting rubber-screeching loops around our most sacred war memorial in a noisy Ford Mustang. And that was just the start.
A wedding that featured in one segment turned out to be staged. Evans and LeBlanc are said to loathe one another. The filming, last week, of the first episode took so long dozens of audience mem- bers walked out. More and more stories emerged about Evans. Some were dredged up from more than 20 years ago, about how in his Big Breakfast presenting days he used to shout and swear and swagger around — sometimes even getting stark naked — in an unattractively dictatorial fashion. But perhaps most worrying of all was the suggestion that Evans was unravelling under the pressure. Not just in juggling Top Gear with his existing broadcasting commitments — he already presents Britain’s most popular breakfast radio show on BBC Radio 2, having dropped The One Show and TFI Friday, his weekly Channel 4 Friday night gig, last year.
But also in coping with stepping into Clarkson’s politically incorrect shoes on the BBC’s most lucrative show.
He was, so the allegations ran, turning into a control-freak bully. An executive producer left after just five months, apparently because of Evans’s ‘tyrannical behaviour’. A script editor went soon after. On several occasions, the Ginger One turned up to work in his pyjamas looking spectacularly dishevelled.
So when I meet him at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, during filming for episode two of Top Gear, it’s nice to find him so relaxed, upbeat and sanguine about the whole thing.
‘Apparently the new show’s going to be s**t,’ he says cheerily. ‘So s**t that people might actually tune in to see just how s**t it is. They’re lowering expectations so much, it’s maybe a good thing. I’d rather under-promise and then overdeliver. At least we’re being talked about,’ he points out.
Even so, he admits that it has been a ‘volatile journey’ and ‘definitely, no question’ the most pressure he’s felt in a new job, ever.
Partly because he feels responsible for the 350 million Top Gear fans around the world. Partly because it’s a complete departure from anything he’s done — ‘we’re going round the world. It’s all prerecorded. It’s very unspontaneous. It’s the opposite of all my TV.’
But also because, unlike his other shows — The Big Breakfast, TFI Friday and Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush — Top Gear will never really be his.
‘It’s somebody else’s show, there’s no doubt about it,’ he says. ‘It’s like taking over Terry Wogan’s radio job all over again, but 100 times worse.’
He warms to the theme. ‘It’s like being the new prime minister — where the most experienced person has just been sacked, and the least experienced person has just been given his job. It’s madness that you’ve got to learn so quickly.’ It’s also bloody hard. Not so much the filming, but trying to recreate the humour, the camaraderie, the puerile japes that, love or loathe them, Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May had down to perfection. The new team consists of Evans, Friends actor and car nut LeBlanc, German racing driver Sabine Schmitz, YouTube star Chris Harris, Formula One pundit — and former team boss — Eddie Jordan, and motoring journalist Rory Reid.
Much has been made of the lack of chemistry between Evans and LeBlanc.
‘You can’t just write it funny. It has to grow. We have to get used to our kitchen,’ he says by way of analogy. He loves analogies. ‘Our guest can only relax when we know where the forks are, but we’re still trying to find them.’
He’s in his trailer in a jungle print shirt and floppy trousers. The place is teeming with people: TV presenter Danny Baker (‘my best man three times — let’s hope I don’t need a fourth!’), Jade, his onceestranged daughter, who pops in with Evans’s one-year-old grandson, Teddy. There are hair and make-up girls, and Tash, his wife of nine years and mother of his two sons Noah, seven, and threeyear-old Eli, potters about looking serene and beautiful and offering home-made egg sandwiches.
He talks quickly, gabbles almost — about his mum being in a hospital barely a mile away, desperately sick with cancer, his two beloved young sons, his favourite car ever (the Mini 1000 his mum bought him when he was 17, even though she couldn’t afford it), and how he throws out one belonging each week to stay grounded.
He is utterly unselfconscious, quite sweary and slightly strange-looking — long, lean and so tall he looks as if he’s been stretched, but with a big bobbing head, huge dome-like forehead and quite extraordinary hair.
‘I dye it,’ he says. ‘It’s all my own, but I use these drops that make it grow. It’s like Baby Bio for your scalp.’
He also takes some sort of hair growth pill, which he once complained made hair grow everywhere in abundance. When he takes his shirt off later for hair and make- up, he reveals angel wing-shaped patches of ginger hair on his back and very orange armpits.
He says he slept nine hours last night, usually needing six to stay ‘healthily unhinged’, but he looks tired.
His last two days alone would have finished most of us off. All day Thursday, when I meet him, filming Top Gear; Friday up at 5am to host his biggest radio breakfast show of the year, featuring the Duchess of Cornwall, three bands, six top actors and a crowd of 1,500 at Shakespeare’s Globe theatre in London; then off to Norway for more Top Gear filming.
How does he manage it — isn’t he going quietly mad?
‘Pressure’s useful,’ he says. ‘If it turns into stress, you’re f****d. But I don’t really get stressed.’
Instead, he says, he compartmentalises everything. And he insists he’s not remotely busy anyway. ‘It’s a big myth. I get up in the morning at five, but I have a part-time job. I finish at half nine. How many people would kill for that?’
But what about the prep that goes into making it all run so smoothly?
It turns out there isn’t any. ‘Without being too highfaluting, it’s like, well . . . a painter doesn’t paint before he goes into a studio. He paints when he’s in the studio. And so do I.’
There have been rumours that those neat compartments of his are leaking and that the pressure has been seeping into his morning job, making him disagreeable and bullying.
‘Rubbish!’ he says. ‘They get the best of me. I love mornings. I love music. Lock me in a box and go and ask anyone I’ve ever worked with at Radio 2 if I’ve ever been bullying. Go on. Ask them!’ But he does admit to being grumpy. ‘Yes, I lose my rag. But not like I used to. I used to be a big shouter and screamer. But I don’t bully people. And I didn’t get my willy out. I wouldn’t be showing it off like a megalomaniac — I wish I had reason to.’
So where are all these stories coming from? Is it a smear campaign led by Clarkson, as some people suspect?
‘I don’t really care. I know what’s going on and I’m in control.’ In the past, however, he was less so. He was BBC Radio’s biggest star, but got too big for his boots, went on endless benders, regularly called in sick, married the then 18-year-old actress and singer Billie Piper in Las Vegas, drank so much he couldn’t say the name of his street to cabbies, and quit on air when his bosses wouldn’t give him Fridays off to party.
Just when it looked like he’d completely implode, he decided to sort himself out. ‘I bought a farm and spent five years there basically trying to figure out what the f**k I’d done wrong.’ Today, it is still a
work in progress. ‘It’s like going to the gym. Stop going and you get fat. Same thing. You have to think about it all the time. It’s a bit boring, but the upside is you can get more done and you don’t feel s**t any more.’
So he runs marathons, plays football with his boys, watches box sets with his wife, rides a motorbike to work because it’s ‘grounding’, and tries not to get caught up in the lunacy of celebrity.
‘If you think it’s all as important as they say it is, you’re in trouble.’
Happily, the lovely Tash is on hand to help. ‘She is very good for me,’ he says. If he gets too puffed up and gobby, she gives him ‘the look’.
‘Just thinking about it makes me want to faint. It’s chilling.’
He still drinks, but on his terms. ‘Last night I had two lemon and honeys, and two glasses of wine. The night before that, nothing. The night before that, nothing. And then the night before that, f****** loads!’
He used to drink whatever he wanted, but the more he drank, the grumpier he became. ‘I’ve been there before, going to work on a hangover. It makes my life unenjoyable, and there’s no need for that because I’ve got a very fortunate life.’ He used to drink with Jeremy Clarkson. ‘We were friends. Not proper friends, but I always looked forward to seeing him.’
Since their musical chairs on Top Gear, he’s texted Clarkson a couple of times, and Clarkson has replied.
‘I suppose it’s a bit awkward for him. And it’s awkward from my side as well. Once our new shows come out, it’ll probably be better.’ Clarkson, Hammond and May are filming The Grand Tour — effectively a new Top Gear for Amazon Prime, due out in the autumn.
Oddly, Chris doesn’t think of the shows as rivals.
‘Creatively, there’s a rivalry, but not in the old-fashioned sense.’ Which is good, because the old guard cast a long shadow. Among the Top Gear audience at Dunsfold, comparisons are inevitable.
‘Wooden’, ‘stilted’ and ‘forced’ are words that pop up. The regular audi- ence members miss the giant vats of tea and coffee the team served with fags hanging out of their mouths; they miss the usual jokes; and they miss the speedy filming, usually done in one go without today’s takes and retakes. But while the chemistry is a work in progress, and Matt LeBlanc looks tired, Evans is good. Brilliant as ever with the audience and special guests — singer Sharleen Spiteri and Homeland actor Damian Lewis — and slick, cheery and professional. Until he’s asked about his favourite ever car, and breaks down in tears when he mentions his mum and that Mini 1000. It’s very moving, but afterwards, he’s upbeat again. ‘It went well, didn’t it? It’s bound to be a bit stilted,’ he says. ‘Our humour can only start when we’re relaxed enough, which probably isn’t yet, to be honest.’ It goes without saying that he’d love the new Top Gear to be better than the old one. ‘But first we’ve got to do a show as good as theirs.’ And is it? ‘I think so. It’s different. It’s about cars. Cars are the one constant, after all. So it’s less what can we do [filming] in Cuba, and more what can we do with this car.’ Speaking of which, what about that Jaguar accident? ‘So I crashed a car — I don’t care. I took it to the limit and I ran out of talent. And road.’ He happily admits to being car sick ‘but only as a passenger on a really twisty track’. He jokes he’s a perfectionist, not a control freak, and that he has no problem talking to camera while driving. He also dismisses the Cenotaph debacle as an unfortunate mix-up, insisting they followed all protocols to the letter, but were caught out by a stills camera which made the angle look terrible. So, on the eve of the new show, is he worried about potentially wrecking the BBC’s biggest hit? ‘Look, my mum’s really ill, my wife had an ectopic pregnancy, my daughter who I didn’t see for years is here today with my grandson. That’s the stuff I care about. Honestly, I don’t want it all to end tomorrow. But if it did, I couldn’t care less.’