The publishing schedules for October contain a memoir called Top Fear, in which Chris Evans is billed to report on the task of taking over the world’s most famous TV motoring show.
After tweeting that he is leaving Top Gear, Evans will now have more time to write the book – although there must be some doubt as to whether he can bear to describe the ordeal.
Evans should perhaps conclude that the greatest failure of his broadcasting career so far – the car crash of Top Gear – came about because he failed to understand his greatest success: the triumphant succession to Sir Terry Wogan on the Radio 2 breakfast show.
Evans won over Wogan’s old geezers and gals – or replaced them with enough new listeners of his own – by being notably different from him in age, tone and approach. But in taking over from Clarkson, he strangely aimed for karaoke, even mimicking his predecessor’s dad jeans and plunging final cadences in sentences.
But while Evans must now consider himself silly to have accepted the deal, BBC managers are at serious fault for ever offering it. The vacancy had notoriously been created by Clarkson shouting at and punching a junior producer, the last in a series of stand-offs with BBC bosses who saw him as editorially reckless and a man with too much control over the show.
And yet the BBC entrusted their £50m global franchise to a broadcaster with a history of stretching regulatory guidelines to breaking point – after messy on-air implosions, he abruptly left Radio 1 in 1997 and Virgin Radio in 2001 – and who was also known to micro-manage his shows as much as possible.
But when recasting shows, executives often fill the hole with the closest-shaped peg they can found. For a gap marked “big, shouty, overgrown teenager who likes cars”, Evans seemed an inspired fit.
Yet there were crucial differences. Clarkson was an expert at scripted, recorded broadcasting, while Evans’s best work was all ad-libbed live. And a motoring journalist who brutally reviewed hyped supercars had been replaced by a car-collecting enthusiast, whose main interest in a vehicle seemed to be whether he wanted it in his own garage. On his second Top Gear, Evans casually announced that he had bought the £260,000 sports car he had just been filmed test-driving.
An additional difficulty was that the BBC was giving a job Clarkson had done pretty much full-time (apart from his newspaper columns) to a man who was waking before dawn every weekday morning to do three hours of live radio, and who had a weekend newspaper column as well.
There is the persistent suggestion that TV bosses, who can be patronising about radio, assumed that Evans would cut back on or even abandon his radio show to go full throttle at Top Gear. The presenter, though, was reportedly reluctant to give up a proven hit for a possible one – and his precaution has proved prophetic. In yet another complication, Evans, apparently to the surprise of the BBC, was also committed to a revival of his old show TGI Friday. A character with a record of proving fragile under professional pressure had taken on a workload that would have alarmed Stakhanov.
One problem triggered another. The BBC has partly attributed Top Gear’s low overnight viewing figures, which reached a record low on Sunday, to the clash with the Euro 2016 football finals. But the timing of new Top Gear was twice pushed back after concerns that the production had fallen behind schedule. If the original timetable had been met, the show would have missed the sport; early disorganisation increased the chance of later ratings failure.
In another unintended consequence, an attempt by Evans to show his managerial maturity – publicly disowning a scandalous stunt in which co-host Matt LeBlanc did wheelies near the cenotaph – irritated the American actor, putting their double act under stress. A popular interpretation of Evans’s departure will be that LeBlanc (who has more international profile) has won a power struggle. However, the current hysterical political news cycle warns us that we do not know for sure yet if there will definitely be a second series, or if LeBlanc will front it.
But the biggest obstacle to Evans was the guaranteed enmity of the Clarkson fanbase, to whom he ranked as Michael Gove does to those who dreamed of a Boris Johnson premiership.
Under fierce scrutiny, Evans, to avoid accusations of hypocrisy from Clarkson’s columns and his bereaved BBC viewers, had to be completely collegiate at all times in the office. However, there were soon regular reports (which Evans denied and the BBC publicly batted away) of overbearing behaviour and disagreements with team-members. One executive producer left the series before it reached the screen; a job description for a replacement emphasised the need for toughness.
Over the weekend, it got worse, with reports confirmed today that police are investigating allegations of historical sexual misconduct by Evans in a workplace. He has previously characterised such claims as a “witch-hunt.”
With the combination of plummeting ratings and impressive talent rising elsewhere in the new lineup (Rory Reid, Chris Harris, Sabine Schmitz), Evans would surely have been untenable for a second series, even without the latest bad publicity, and will now hope his dodgy, dangerous choice of TV vehicle has not contaminated his radio brand.
In getting the chance to find out, Evans is already luckier than two other Radio 2 presenters. Paul Gambaccini was suspended as soon as sexual allegations against him (which were subsequently dismissed) became public, while Tony Blackburn was sacked for disagreeing with BBC management on the meaning of a memo written in 1971.
The fact that director general Lord Tony Hall is allowing him to remain on radio despite confirmation that he is under police investigation suggests that Evans continues to be regarded as a special case by the BBC. He should be grateful for their loyalty but, if he ever writes Top Fear, might complain about them giving him a job for which he was always the wrong choice.
