Chris Evans

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2005

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the broadcaster Chris Evans. He is one of the most creative and influential broadcasters of his generation. He has been hailed as the saviour of more than one radio station and made a name for himself on television too - first of all on The Big Breakfast, but also with his own formats, including Don't Forget Your Toothbrush and TFI Friday. He's won a clutch of awards and, by taking over Virgin radio, made himself a millionaire many times over. But he also gained a reputation for being brash and bullying; he walked out on more than one job and his drinking binges were splashed across the tabloids.

Since those days he's married and divorced, lived in America and, more recently, pursued a more peaceful existence - keeping chickens and growing vegetables at his cottage in the English countryside.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Here, There and Everywhere by The Beatles Book: Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens Luxury: A pair of swimming goggles with prescription lenses

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a broadcaster. During the 1990s he was the whiz kid of the airwaves, the man with a
0:35.1	magic touch whose every show on radio or television caught the mood of the nation
0:39.5	and drew tumultuous response. Born and brought up in a working-class family in Warrington in Lancashire, he got a job in
0:45.9	local radio in Manchester and then moved to London, where first on local radio and then with
0:50.8	television shows such as The Big Breakfast and TFI Friday
0:54.3	he became popular, rich and famous. His noisy, boosy lifestyle matched his
0:59.9	irreverent image and so did the rouse he seemed to have wherever he worked
1:03.6	radio one and Virgin radio where he'd succeeded in buying the whole station
1:07.4	and making himself a millionaire but in the end the roistering and the arguments
1:11.9	seemed to overtake him and he announced he was taking a the back gently on radio too as presenter of its Saturday afternoon show.
1:24.7	I still haven't got a clue how I got here, he says, except that I've got a load of energy.
1:29.8	That's the one thing that's been constant through my life, he is Chris Evans.
1:34.7	So more than four years, four and a half years, Chris, off the airwaves, which is amazing for somebody
1:40.7	for whom broadcasting was a kind of life blood.
1:43.0	Where have you been?
1:43.8	What have you been doing?
1:44.8	Nothing?
1:45.9	I've been doing, I've been living a life.
1:49.0	I've been mostly in the country.
1:51.9	By that, I mean, in sorry, in a little cottage, two bedroom cottage,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.