It’s a pitch straight out of a Travel Tavern bedroom. Idea for TV show: The Grimmy Reaper. In a post-apocalyptic dystopia, lawless masses are permitted to make their opinions heard on social media, destroying the careers of former Radio 1 breakfast show hosts. Nick Grimshaw must travel back in time to destroy the internet – and save his own future.
Regrettably, even noteworthy hair and Harry Styles’s mobile number couldn’t have thwarted this week’s sorry state of affairs, which has seen Chris Evans suggest that if you don’t like the new Top Gear, it’s because you’ve never made a TV show so just shut up. Noel Edmonds, meanwhile, told a Twitter user with cancer that his ill-health might be caused by “negative attitude”, before appearing on ITV’s This Morning to Noelsplain to an aghast Philip Schofield that yes, stress and negative energy can cause cancer, while a £2,300 electromagnetic pulse machine sold by his mates could sort things out.
First, though, to Evans. The perceived failure of Top Gear has reignited the country’s obsession with his lengthy – and curiously success-strewn – fall from grace. Twitter is one thing, but here’s an example from Mail Online, home of the literal headline, which on Wednesday evening ran an article titled “Top Gear host Chris Evans hits the skids as he is spotted drinking in the street just days after his show loses a third of its audience by episode two”. In common with 78% of all Mail content, the article included the phrases “looked downbeat”, “not a friend in sight” and “cut a figure of loneliness”, although some may argue that the photos simply depicted Evans “cutting the figure” of a chap having a glass of wine while locked out of his house.
Last week, Evans responded to Top Gear’s underwhelming overnight viewing figures with a degree of dignity, pointing out that the show had achieved a greater audience share than the first episode of the final Jeremy Clarkson series, and that catch-up figures were strong. This week, pressure from the public and the media seems to have taken its toll: two hours after the Mail Online story, Buzzfeed published an exclusive chat with Evans who magnanimously observed that the new Top Gear was actually brilliant and that viewers who didn’t like it were wrong.
“I find it hilarious,” he said, and please bear in mind that Evans does find this whole debacle very amusing indeed, “that people who have never made a show in their lives then presume what is right and what is wrong with the making of a television programme.”
One can only suppose that unless Evans is well-versed in the complexities of aeronautical engineering, he would see no reason to complain if one afternoon a passenger jet dropped out of the sky and landed on his head. Are, one goes on to wonder, 9.7 million people also wrong for enjoying his Radio 2 breakfast show – the most listened-to programme on the UK’s biggest radio station? Few of those listeners have made a show in their lives, so how can they possibly consider it well-made? Funnily enough, Chris doesn’t seem to have applied his logic to radio and, in fairness, he hasn’t been required to defend it so vehemently; he’s proved a natural and warm presenter who’s taken the breakfast show in his own new direction. But he has also been permitted to – it seems fair to assume the listeners he inherited from Terry Wogan were a little more, shall we say, reasonable than those anyone would inherit from Clarkson.
In any case, as the Buzzfeed chat unfolded, Evans started talking about Top Gear’s place come armageddon (“the only way it is going to disappear is when the planet disappears”). This leads us back to Noel Edmonds, another TV “ideas man” forced to defend himself against the media, both social and established, and in Edmonds’ case, doing so through a heavy cloud of delusion, defensiveness and combativeness, styling mousse and heinous floral shirts. His This Morning appearance saw a one-time master of the medium blundering into car-crash TV.
Noel’s attentions are mainly back on radio these days – he recently launched Positivity Radio World, a network of online stations that he introduced to potential advertisers in a video, shot on a smartphone, as “the most exciting media opportunity of all time”. Numerous stations cater to different interests. So there’s Positively Laughing, for people who like laughing, and Positively Bristol, for people who like Bristol. As they’re online stations, it’s possible to see how many people are listening, which leads us to Positively Successful – a station that at the time of writing is being listened to by one person.
If Noel can’t use positive thinking to generate listening figures in excess of one, it’s hard to see how he can use it to prevent cancer, but let’s not bog ourselves down in detail because something exciting is happening here. It’s not the basis for a Partridge-esque TV idea. These are the foundations of a political party.
It’s the perfect plan: if the Edmonds-Evans “Noelition” can’t get votes, Evans will be able to insist on taking power regardless, as voters have never run the country and are therefore not entitled to an opinion. Edmonds, meanwhile, can appear on television arguing with mathematicians that zero is a greater number than whichever number of votes other parties received. Ideal or not ideal, that’s the future of democracy.
