Chris Evans was late for his Radio 2 breakfast show on Wednesday two days before the return of TFI Friday on Channel 4.
But the Radio 2 DJ, who turned up 30 minutes late, had a more prosaic excuse than his hard-living 1990s heyday when he presented the Radio 1 breakfast show – he had a parents’ evening to attend the previous night.
The new presenter of BBC2’s Top Gear was branded a “numpty to the max” by Radio 2’s early breakfast presenter Vanessa Feltz, who filled in for Evans while he listened from his car on his way to work.
Evans, who will begin a new 10-part run of TFI Friday this week after the success of the show’s 20th anniversary special earlier this year, offered to take Feltz for a meal at a restaurant of her choosing anywhere within the M25.
When he took to the air just after 7am, half an hour after his scheduled 6.30am start time, Evans told listeners: “That was a nice lie-in.”
He dedicated the show to “anyone who had recently changed their alarm clock to the right time”.
“I’m not blaming anyone apart from myself. But if I was blaming someone else – or something else – it would be parents’ evening.”
Evans said last month that working on TFI Friday would not hamper his attempt to reinvent Top Gear, saying he had “never been business but never had more spare time”.
“I do think now I am busier than I have ever been but I have never had more spare time because I am more organised. Before I did the whole Alice Cooper thing where you have to live the life to portray the life, you don’t really have to do that.”
While waiting for Evans to turn up, Feltz suggested the presenter had been “playing hooky on the day at school when you learned the 24-hour clock”. She also filled in for Evans in January when he was half an hour late.
The Radio 2 breakfast show is the biggest radio programme in the UK with an audience of nearly 10 million listeners a week.
