I never really liked Chris Evans on the radio other than when he was first on GLR. I thought he was good on the Big Breakfast TV show, and liked the original TGI Friday shows (got bored by the end), and was a complete anorak of the Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush series, but radio, no.
He represented that loud uncaring Britpop focussed binge drinking self-obsessed liberal elite of Labour voting middle-income yobs. Well, ok in his case ‘middle-income’ is a little bit of an understatement, but the drones who would follow him either were or had aspirations to be.
To slag his radio career off completely is wrong. It was right for a moment in time, and for a number of people. It just got so boring so quickly for everybody else.
In those days his PR machine was so good that he’d be constantly in the newspapers – more so than that guy who does reality TV talent shows who has loads of made up newspaper exposure with women to hide the fact that he’s actually gay.
When Evans was out on benders rather than coming in to work, his followers thought it was cool and funny, and just didn’t get why he was sacked. Why should any employers have to put up with absenteeism due to binge drinking, regardless of who the alcoholic is?
So, finally his career came to a shuddering halt and he was able to disappear from the limelight but with enough money in the bank to feed a small starving nation or sort out Greece, or certainly more than anybody could ever win on the Lottery, so working was unimportant. His publicity machine dropped him out of the newspapers, and he was yesterday’s news.
At different times his programming ideas would appear on TV and bomb. He was out of touch with the audiences.
Some years passed and suddenly he re-invented himself. It was announced that he would host the Brit Awards for 2005, and he appeared on TV to publicise his market stall where he was selling off a lot of his possessions, and then appeared on TV as the publicity for the one-off UK Radio Aid, which he was to be a morning presenter on. To many he looked and acted like somebody recovering from a nervous breakdown, as he shuffled around being a much quieter and reserved version of his former self.
Slipped into conversation on a number of occasions he would reveal that he no longer had a mobile phone or a TV set. Not many people picked up on this, but I’m wondering why he started saying this, and was it actually true? Was it some form of stunt, or had he genuinely found no need for a TV or a mobile phone?
My own personal view of TV is that it is a dangerous drug that people use, and for most of the time a waste of time, but it has its place. My TV spends a lot of time switched off, and I am mainly a selective viewer, not someone who just leaves it on regardless night after night. My real life is far more important than just watching other people’s pretend lives, and I have things to do, people to do them with. Equally, my mobile is most important to me, yet I know how to switch it off, screen calls or pace how I use it.
Surely, what Evans should have done is taught himself how to pace himself with his TV and mobile phone. So, I’m wondering what the announcing this in public was all really about. It did seem a bit of an odd thing for a media person to do. When did he do it? When his latest programming ideas all bombed? Was it a stunt? Was it a cry for help from a lonely and confused man? We’ll probably never know.
Is it actually a good idea to throw away the TV and mobile phone? Had he actually found the karma that most people seek but don’t find until they too throw away their TV?
Hmmm. Well, if it was designed to get people thinking about Chris Evans again, he got me hook, line and sinker, I s’pose.
Today he’s the number one most listened to breakfast show across the UK where he now plays tired old records from before he was born instead of the vibrant and new stuff he was pioneering in his previous radio life. He appears to once again have a mobile and a TV, and is happy to pay out Twelve Million Pounds for his latest car. So, he’s back at the top, albeit reinvented and, some might argue, a humble slightly spooky shadow of his former self, but did he really survive his wilderness years with no mobile and television?
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