TOP
10
‘TURNS' I HAVE EMPLOYED
10 Chris Moyles
9 Gaby Roslin
8 Terry Wogan
7 Vernon Kay
6 Danny Baker
5 Jimmy Tarbuck
4 Lionel Blair
3 Melanie Sykes
2 Terry Venables
1 Jonathan Ross
SO WHERE WERE WE?
Ah yes, October 1997 and I had launched my breakfast show on Virgin Radio – a great gig, except that Virgin's owner, Richard Branson, was about to sell the station to the Capital Group, whereupon I would be out of a job in just ten weeks; barely enough time to get used to the decor.
That's when the highly precocious ruse occurred in my ludicrously over-ambitious mind; to see if I could buy the station myself. It was the craziest of my not inconsiderable list of crazy ideas to date, but if I wanted to stay on the air then I had no choice. After my disastrously self-indulgent, ego-fuelled departure from Radio 1 only a few months before, my reputation was in tatters, rendering me virtually unemployable.
Astonishingly, with the help of some major financial backers, and with a top team around me, I pulled it off. Two months after joining the station I snapped up the ownership of Virgin Radio from under the noses of the Capital Group, overnight finding myself breakfast DJ and proprietor rolled into one.
I'd been in a few fairly daunting positions before in my rollercoaster career, though nothing quite on this scale. However, my owning Virgin Radio was only ever destined to be a temporary proprietorship. I was always going to have to sell the station to repay the people who had lent me the money in the first place – a story we will get to all in good time.
Meanwhile, I was still presenting TFI Friday every week, so my new job of media mogul had to be fitted in between my morning radio programme and the Friday TV show. But hey, I was a young man with vast amounts of energy, limitless enthusiasm and more ideas than I knew what to do with. What could possibly go wrong? I asked myself.
Answer; everything. But not just quite yet.
There I was, king of my own media castle, albeit with the minor inconvenience of owing the banks, my investors and Richard Branson £85 million.
Was I nervous? Not in the least. Not a lot can make you nervous after borrowing £85 million – unless it's the possibility of losing it. But I wasn't going there. I was excited and couldn't wait to get to grips with my new empire.
In the beginning, before I discovered there was also a downside to being the boss, what turned me on most was the freedom I had to be creative. I was now in a similar position to many of my heroes, two in particular, namely Charlie Chaplin and Jim Henson. I have been a fan of both for years.
Chaplin was a truly exceptional man, almost more so for his business acumen than his on-screen genius. As soon as Charlie could afford to, he bought his own studios on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, where he began to self-fund and self-produce some of his most famous movies. With independence came control and with control came purity and perfection. He could green-light his own projects and make them exactly as he wanted without having to kowtow to any studio egomaniacs.
This situation only served to bolster Charlie's already formidable confidence, and with talent plus creative control equalling power and profitability, before he was thirty the boy from the slums of south London was earning well in excess of $1 million a year – back in the 1920s!
Jim Henson was equally autonomous with his legendary Muppet productions almost half a century later; the beautifully ironic connection being that he bought the old Chaplin studios to use as his base. My favourite part of this story is that whereas in Chaplin's day there was a giant statue of his tramp standing proudly on the roof for all of Tinseltown to see, when Jim moved in he erected a similar-sized statue of Kermit the Frog. And best of all – in homage to the studio's former illustrious owner – Henson also dressed the world's favourite amphibian as Chaplin's tramp, complete with black suit, funny shoes, cane and bowler hat. This cleverest of tributes can still be seen atop the studio roof today.
With thoughts like these racing through my mind, I couldn't help feeling inspired by the ma**ive opportunities that lay ahead of me. I too owned my own company, the Ginger Media Group, consisting now of a television production arm – Ginger Productions, which made TFI Friday – and a radio station. I also had a five-year lease on my own television studio, and I was surrounded by producers, writers and people who could make things happen at a moment's notice.
Almost straight away I decided to take advantage of my new-found freedom.
It was a Saturday morning and I'd just been for a run. Having returned home a little sweaty I decided to treat myself to a few bubbles and a good old soak – I love the lure of the lather. I lay there luxuriating and listening to one of our competitors, broadcasting that it was the first day of the footy season and how we should all be lapping it up.
The presenter and his various contributors sounded progressively more ebullient, and as the show went on, the more I felt we were missing out as my station had little if anything to do with football. This was a big day for millions of people and we were not part of it.
‘Hang on a minute, I don't need to feel like this anymore,' I thought. ‘I own the damn radio station, I can do anything I want and I don't have to ask anyone's permission.'
I jumped out of the bath, rang the studio and told the DJ who was currently on air to inform the guy who followed him that he could have the afternoon off. I was on my way in and I would be presenting our new Saturday afternoon sports and music show.
‘Really, what shall I say it's called?' he asked.
‘Oh, er – hang on a sec, I'll ring you back with that.'
I hadn't considered a title. Two minutes later I was back on the phone.
‘Tell him – and the listeners whilst you're at it – that the new show is called Rock and Roll Football. Music and footy all the way till final score. It does exactly what it says on the tin.'
After making a quick cup of tea and throwing on some clothes, I began a ring round of the biggest footie heads I knew and asked them to come and help me. To a man they obliged, although they had little idea as to what exactly they might be helping me with.
That afternoon we launched one of the most straightforward shows I have ever been involved in. All we did was play music whilst watching Sky Sports Soccer Saturday with the sound down. Every time there was a goal we let our listeners know where it had occurred and who had scored it, then it was back to the music. At half-time we would have a quick ‘round the grounds' catch-up, also featuring different halftime treats from different clubs; curries, kebabs, pork pies, pasties and whatever else fans were munching on.
Come five o'clock we presented our own slapdash version of the cla**ified results, followed by any breaking footie stories, followed by half an hour of going-out music, which was exactly what we had intended to do the second the original programme had come off air.
Rock and Roll Football remained on air every Saturday afternoon during the football season until 2008 – almost a decade after I had left the radio station, picking up some pretty hefty sponsors along the way. And all because of a sweaty jog resulting in me needing a bath and a few bubbles.
As my reign as boss continued, my creative freedom quickly extended to hiring new talent that I thought might strengthen our line-up. My first top-three signings were ex-England football manager Terry Venables, BRMB's Harriet Scott and the über-famous Jonathan Ross.
Because Rock and Roll Football had been an instant hit, I decided to start the sporting theme earlier on in the schedule and asked El Tel to co-host a football phone-in at midday on Saturday.
Terry was another hero of mine who had since become a pal. We first met in a local wine bar, when he let me into the secret of how he set about organising the England team to trounce Holland 4-1 at Wembley during Euro 96. He swore me to secrecy, so all I can say is it was simple but genius. Now I wanted that genius on the radio. Thankfully, he agreed and our footy phone-in was born.
Hiring Harriet Scott, my first female signing, was the result of listening to a good old-fashioned demo-tape that someone played me one morning. She had clearly racked up a lot of hours on the wireless, sounding warm and at ease, her style flowing effortlessly thanks to all those little tricks of the trade without which a radio show can sound so terribly clunky.
We called her agent and offered her a gig straight away. She accepted and a few weeks later moved down from Birmingham to London to become the new host of our afternoon show.
However, there was more to Harriet than first met the eye. She was a young lady who'd had her own fair share of headlines in the past – front pages of the tabloids, no less.
‘Oh, I remember now,' I exclaimed one night in the pub when she mentioned the incident in question. The story was all about a to-do she'd had with the husband of a famous female television presenter with whom it was alleged she was having a secret liaison. Apparently during one of their dates she'd whacked him one and given him a black eye in the process. The tabloids subsequently splashed the picture of the bloke and his shiner all over their front pages. ‘Feisty little Harriet,' I thought.
‘And yet you seem so calm and gentle and … small,' I said to her.
‘Yeah, well you just watch it matey, there's plenty more where that came from,' she giggled. At least I think she giggled.
Several years later, when I was no longer her boss, Harriet and I dated for a while – a most enjoyable experience from beginning to end I'm glad to say, and one from which I emerged entirely injury-free. Goodness only knows what the other fellow had done to incur her wrath.
Jonathan Ross was the next name on my hit list, and oh what twists and turns our relationship would come to experience. Jonathan has been a recurring theme throughout my career for reasons that will become evident as the pages of this story unfold, but I initially encountered him in my very first job after I'd moved down to London.
I was a wet-behind-the-ears twenty-three-year-old from Manchester's Piccadilly Radio and had managed to blag a job as a production a**istant on a new night-time station called Radio Radio.
Jonathan was quickly becoming the hottest new face on television with his Channel 4 chat show The Last Resort and had agreed to present a one-hour radio show twice a week for the fledgling network in return for a squillion pounds. Unfortunately for everyone involved none of this lasted very long, with the company folding only a few months later under spiralling costs and practically zero advertising revenue.
Following Radio Radio, our paths had crossed several times since, as I had now become a recognisable face in my own right and had appeared as a guest on his Saturday Zoo show, as well as attempting to collaborate with him in an effort to get him back on television when he'd lost his way a bit.
[Adopt Michael Caine voice here] Now not a lot of people know this but I actually wrote TFI Friday,/i> for Jonathan. I was going to produce it with him as the presenter.
I'd asked him over to my flat in north London for a cup of tea, where the two of us lay on the gra** in my garden, chewing the television fat. I remember it vividly, second only to the day I asked Jools Holland (my ultimate TV hero) to be musical director on Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, another red-letter day for the Evans boy.
My initial idea for Jonathan was for a Sunday show based in a church, with Jonathan as the preacher/host, the congregation/audience in the pews, guests in the confessional and music from the choir area.
The Sunday Joint, as I had titled it, slowly evolved into TFI Friday after I came to the conclusion it was probably better to piggyback on the natural positive energy of a Friday evening than try to manufacture similar energy on a Sunday.
The main man at Channel 4 at the time liked the idea for the show but when I declared Jonathan as my first-choice host, replied with these exact words:
‘Everyone knows Jonathan is yesterday's man.'
This didn't stop the same exec trying to rehire him a few years later when he was back on top.
As Jonathan's brother Paul always says, ‘Form is temporary – cla** is permanent.' Bravo Paul and bravo Jonathan, for now at least.
After I eventually took up the mantle of TFI Friday, Jonathan's career continued to founder but I was always wondering how I could get to work with him. Now I owned my own radio station I could simply offer him a job.
Our Saturday line-up was becoming an unexpected highlight of the week, with Terry at lunchtime, Rock and Roll Football in the afternoon, and Johnny Boy Revell and his Wheels of Steel ushering us into Saturday night. If Wossy was at a loose end, he could do a lot worse than kick off our Saturdays with a mid-morning music/interview show…
For me he is the most natural talker in British broadcasting. He isn't just blessed with a sharp mind and a quick jaw; it's almost as if Jonathan needs to talk to stay alive.
The only other person I've seen blessed/blighted with this condition is the great Danny Baker, who runs JR pretty close when it comes to the art of rabbiting. I once went out for lunch with both of them. I don't think I said more than fifteen words for the duration of the whole meal, as Jonathan and Danny went head to head in a conversational clash of the titans. They talked continuously and – for the most part – at the same time. I was sure that neither of them listened to a single word the other one had to say.
When I made the call to JR about coming to work for me it was a really big deal. I felt almost audacious as I sat in my recently purchased, stupidly big, green Bentley parked spookily enough in Great Portland Street, right outside what is now Radio 2. Of course little did any of us know at the time how important that building would become to both our stories in a decade's time.
As I dialled his number on my car phone, I continued to rehearse my pitch to him as to why he might want to join the wonderful world of the wireless. After no more than a couple of rings he picked up and I launched straight in.
‘What do you have to lose?' I concluded after I was done.
‘Chris, I'm not so sure you know, radio's what you do, I'm a telly man, always have been, and that's where I want to be.'
I suspected this was how the conversation might go and I could understand Jonathan's concerns. Some television people – in those days, especially – may have seen radio as a step down, but I had prepared my little spiel. I told Jonathan that radio was the best ‘shop window' in our business bar none; the perfect advert for a broadcaster's talent. I explained to him that because he was so natural he had nothing to fear. I added that radio also has a knack of easing a broadcaster back into people's consciousness, whilst also affording them a more intimate relationship with a much more discerning and receptive audience.
This – and whatever else I said during the course of our brief chat – must have struck a chord, as Jonathan called me back a couple of days later, saying he was up for it. He was on air within a fortnight and quickly settled in to become another quality cannon to add to our weekend arsenal of radio fire power.
We gave him a show that ran from ten till one on a Saturday morning. It was precisely the time my old Greater London Radio show had aired almost a decade before, not the only thing the two shows had in common. I called in my old colleague Andy Davies to produce Jonathan. Andy had done exactly the same for me at GLR, so I thought he would be the perfect person to hold Jonathan's hand – and I'm glad to say I was right.
The happy couple were still together ten years later, doing an almost identical show for the mighty Radio 2 and winning countless awards in the process. The shop-window theory worked a treat; within a year of joining us, the BBC came for Jonathan in a big way, transferring his show lock, stock and barrel to Saturday mornings on their national FM network.
With the power of Radio 2 behind him, Jonathan was firmly back on the entertainment map and it was only a matter of time before the clarion call of television could be heard. The birth of his Friday night BBC 1 talk show followed in 2001 and in no time at all Jonathan was back on top, where he would remain for the best part of the next decade.
The irony was that Jonathan wrote to me asking if I would be a guest on that first series of his talk show, some three years after I had employed him at the radio station and approximately a year after I had gone slightly cuckoo and off into my wilderness years. In many ways, Jonathan and I had effectively swapped places, but the last thing I wanted to do at that point was jump back on the bus. I replied to him by letter saying, ‘Thanks old boy, deeply flattered, good luck with your new venture but I'm not really “at it” anymore.'
I meant every word at the time and in truth never expected to be ‘at it' again – least of all with him, on the very same show, nine years later, which is exactly what happened.
I did eventually appear on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross in October 2009 to promote my first book, It's Not What You Think.
However, as you will come to learn, this was a book that only came about as a result of Jonathan's infamous appearance on Russell Brand's radio show. I can a**ure you that if Jonathan and Russell had not made that phone call to Andrew Sachs, neither of my two books would ever have come into being, but that is a story I will return to later on.