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 assistant 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 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 grass 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 – class 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 flounder 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