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Eddy Says
Eddy Says: Tales from the attic – the Chris Evans era at Radio 1
By Eddy Temple-Morris | Published on Monday 22 November 2010
Back in the mid-90s, while approaching the peak of his first round of popularity, Chris Evans became the host of Radio 1’s breakfast show. Allowed unprecedented freedom for a radio presenter at any station, he took ratings up to 7.5 million, but controversy and various fallouts with BBC management brought it all to an end in under two years. Eddy was one of the few people at Radio 1 who saw the inside of the machine.
In between getting wound up by rubbish Christmas product ads and females of all ages who stop at the top of the escalator because they think the bit where the stairs fold flat and turns around is going to eat them, I’ve noticed the posters advertising that the latest Chris Evans autobiography is out. Cue the familiar crackle of the log fire, and with a stroke of the dozing labrador by my side, and a knowing tap on the pipe, I’ll tell you the story of how I got to work with Chris when he was at the height of his powers.
Let me take you to a good year or so after the Michael Hutchence episode I wrote about the other week, to a time when Britpop was in full swing. Oasis wanted Blur to “die of AIDS”. Blur wished Oasis no better. Drum n bass had just had its first crossover hit in the form of Goldie’s ‘Inner City Life’. Chris Evans was the hottest property in TV. Matthew Bannister, the inspirational Controller of Radio 1 at the time, made his move and persuaded Chris to take on the nation’s favourite’s breakfast show.
At that time, I was the long haired, motorcycle-riding, jingle-meister at ‘Radio Fab’. My job was to make every show on the station sound like a Radio 1 show, like it was made inside Egton House – then the home of Radio 1. For a few shows that was a tall order, as they were produced in buildings far away, on different equipment, in different studios, by people who did not work for us directly.
This new breakfast show was made by Ginger, Chris’ by now legendary production company. I had to infiltrate this team and, like some kind of Mission Impossible, make them toe the line. Chris didn’t suffer fools. And the fact that, in those days (I don’t know about now), he was not the most approachable superstar didn’t help either. But, for some reason, he did choose to tolerate me. In fact he seemed to take a bit of a shine to me, perhaps because in this leather clad ne’er-do-well he saw a bit of the rebelliousness that drove him.
Whatever it was, he granted me access to the loft area that Ginger had purloined from BBC Resources. They’d cordoned off the entire ‘penthouse’ floor of Egton House, and this was their domain, untouched by pretty much everyone at Radio 1. They were self-produced, so no big time producer from in the building needed to go there. And because they took a budget and no staff – no researcher, no broadcast assistant, no PA, no studio manager (as the engineers were called in the still pretty archaic BBC at that time) – I was one of only a handful of people in the building who conducted any official BBC business in this incredible den of mayhem.
It was like someone had let off a hand grenade in a cash and carry up there. They had several blaggers on the team, whose job it was to get free stuff. Every food brand, alcohol, soft drink, clothes, hell EVERY company making every flipping thing in the 90s sent free stuff to this show.
Like James Garner in ‘The Great Escape’, you could get anything, any corporate contraband. I could walk out of there with a ‘Going Downstairs Present’ of beer, jam, chocolate, doughnuts, a Light Sabre, a Space Hopper or a set of four toy Mini Cooper S’s from ‘The Italian Job’.
You could hear the roar of happy laughter and the staccato hiss of beer cans being opened from mid-morning, when Simon Mayo was in the middle of his ‘Golden Hour’.
The atmosphere up there was electrically charged, with a mixture of fin de siècle, roman emperor style naughtiness and pure creative energy. Chris’ interesting and charming entourage, at the time, were a joy to be around.
But I had a job to do and I couldn’t be distracted by the steady flow of alcohol and laughs. I had to get the show into shape and persuade them to play jingles and talk about other shows on the station. I knew Chris and his team were suckers for Britpop, so getting them to big-up ‘The Evening Session’ with Jo Whiley and Steve Lamacq wasn’t so hard. But jingles. Hmmm.
At the time, Radio 1 was still in old studios, pretty much the same ones used by Tony Blackburn and co in the 1960s. Jingles were played out on these funny blue ‘carts’. They were, essentially, ancient eight-track cartridges, the precursor to cassettes, amazingly still used 30 years later. They were big, hefty tape-loops, with one jingle on each cart. Legendary Kenny Everett jingles, through to Steve Wright’s comedy characters, were all recorded and re-recorded onto these cumbersome blue, plastic things.
So, I recorded and built a huge stack of jingles for Chris, who took the towering pile with good grace. Not long afterwards he returned to my desk holding an almost equally high pile of carts. Chris is much taller than you think he’d be.
“These are for you to recycle, I can’t use them”, he said, with a cheeky, almost Mona Lisa-like half smile.
“Why on earth not?” I enquired, mystified.
“These ones have my name on… so I can’t use them”. He put down the tottering stack beside my desk. “These ones are OK”, he said, pointing to a small pile of about half a dozen carts.
I was flabberghasted. “But how will people know who you are?”
“I don’t need a voice to tell them, they already know. I never, ever, play jingles with my name on”.
I was quietly impressed. There were all these massively egocentric presenters that demanded myriad jingles, all featuring their name, then here was this man, with a right to have a bigger ego than all of them, asking me NOT to say his name on anything. This, I must admit, had a profound effect on me. I’d worked at Xfm for several years before I ever said my name on air, something I was forced to do by a new boss and subsequent bosses.
So, I took back the carts and went back to the drawing board, writing new, funny, daft, irreverent lines that told people what and whom they were listening to, without saying the DJ’s name. Of course it didn’t last forever, eventually Matthew Bannister and I, between us, persuaded Chris that we could meet halfway and brand the programme ‘The Christopher Evans Breakfast Show’.
When it finally came time for Radio 1 to build a new studio for itself, to usher in a new era of Radio 1 presenters like Danny Rampling, Lisa I’Anson, Westwood and Mary Anne Hobbs, we took the chance to get rid of the old cart machines and replace them with MiniDiscs. These were great, because they compressed sound really sexily and you could load ALL your jingles onto one disc, and conveniently scroll through them, rather than have to take each cart out and replace it with another.
But this simple, logical and practical move managed to throw Chris completely. For him, the humble ‘cart’ embodied a golden age of radio that he had grown up with, that had inspired him to becoming the mega-celebrity he now was. He didn’t want to let go, and the farce that followed was both amusing and frustrating, and demonstrated his sheer bloody mindedness and head-down stubbornness. Chris refused to take the MiniDisc with his jingles and idents. He wanted us to reinstall the cart machines just for him. This was impossible in the new desk set-up, I told him.
“Right. I want every jingle on a separate minidisc”, came his response.
“But Chris…” I beseeched. “Each one of these can hold ALL your jingles five times over!
“I don’t give a shit”, he insisted, bullishly. “I want them to be like carts; one disc, one jingle. If I find another jingle on any disc, I’ll throw it in the bin”.
“Mmkay”.
Of course, it’d take me about thirty times longer, but who was I to argue with this towering ginger broadcasting genius who was becoming the most powerful person in British media?
I never told Chris this, but I was always in awe of him, and would have done anything he asked. For me, he was one of those ‘special ones’ who’d made what was, for me, one of the handful of radio shows that stood out historically. The ones you’d give to a super intelligent alien as the best ones in human history. I’m not talking about the ‘Radio 1 Breakfast Show’ here, but the one he did on BBC Local Radio in London, or GLR as it was called then. Chris’s show there was the funniest, most charmingly brilliant radio show I’d ever heard up til that point. He had the astounding combination of Kenny Everett’s irreverence and boundless energy, with the effortlessness of Terry Wogan. For this reason, I would always have time for him, and he will always have my undying respect.
Not because we both love The Longpigs. Not even because he proclaimed on his show that I was, in his opinion, “the coolest man in radio”, but because when you make one of those shows (or one of those albums – I’ve written about why I will always doff my cap to Mike Skinner for ‘Original Pirate Material’ in this very column) then, in my book, you’re elevated to God-like status. Like Chris Morris for his Radio 1 show (there’s another little story there, my fireside friends), or John Peel for everything he did.
Chris Evans is easy to knock, but I won’t hear a bad word about him without fighting his corner because I know from experience, as I do with Chris Martin, Gary Lightbody and good old Michael Hutchence, that they are, as Jose Mourinho cloyingly referred to himself, ‘Special Ones’.
Next week a break from Uncle Ted’s Showbiz Tales, and back to a good old fashioned rant.
Eddy x
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