want and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.’
I jumped out of the bath, rang the studio and told the DJ who was currently on air to inform the guy who followed him that he could have the afternoon off. I was on my way in and I would be presenting our new Saturday afternoon sports and music show.
‘Really, what shall I say it’s called?’ he asked.
‘Oh, er – hang on a sec, I’ll ring you back with that.’
I hadn’t considered a title. Two minutes later I was back on the phone.
‘Tell him – and the listeners whilst you’re at it – that the new show is called Rock and Roll Football. Music and footy all the way till final score. It does exactly what it says on the tin.’
After making a quick cup of tea and throwing on some clothes, I began a ring round of the biggest footie heads I knew and asked them to come and help me. To a man they obliged, although they had little idea as to what exactly they might be helping me with.
That afternoon we launched one of the most straightforward shows I have ever been involved in. All we did was play music whilst watching Sky Sports Soccer Saturday with the sound down. Every time there was a goal we let our listeners know where it had occurred and who had scored it, then it was back to the music. At half-time we would have a quick ‘round the grounds’ catch-up, also featuring different halftime treats from different clubs; curries, kebabs, pork pies, pasties and whatever else fans were munching on.
Come five o’clock we presented our own slapdash version of the classified results, followed by any breaking footie stories, followed by half an hour of going-out music, which was exactly what we had intended to do the second the original programme had come off air.
Rock and Roll Football remained on air every Saturday afternoon during the football season until 2008 – almost a decade after I had left the radio station, picking up some pretty hefty sponsors along the way. And all because of a sweaty jog resulting in me needing a bath and a few bubbles.
As my reign as boss continued, my creative freedom quickly extended to hiring new talent that I thought might strengthen our line-up. My first top-three signings were ex-England football manager Terry Venables, BRMB’s Harriet Scott and the über-famous Jonathan Ross.
Because Rock and Roll Football had been an instant 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
