The Nineties king who fuelled Britain's dreadful excess culture

close Cancel email WhatsApp link share Share bookmark Save The soundtrack to the 90s was 'Wake Up, Boo!' by the Boo Radleys, a glorious, up-tempo song that only just scraped into the top 10. But it was given staying power by a repurposed version being used as a jingle on Chris Evans's Radio 1 breakfast show, which launched around the same time. Such was Evans's influence at the time. In days when most TV viewers had a choice of four channels, and digital radio was in its infancy, Evans was virtually unavoidable. He championed bands and singers he liked; his ebullient and chaotic sense of humour was infectious; he didn't look typically cool, but he so plainly was cool that his ascent made it feel that anyone could do anything through force of nature alone. But forces of nature tend to cause damage. Evans and his antics – fuelled often by heavy drinking – ended up symbolising an early 21st century decline that Britain is still coming to terms with. He nearly broke himself in the process. Evans was everywhere. He started out as a radio producer in the Eighties and came to national attention when he helped launch The Big Breakfast in 1992 – a zany, irreverent show that changed the face of breakfast television. Two years later, having set up his own production company, Evans developed and fronted another TV hit, Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, before returning to radio to helm the crucial breakfast slot on BBC Radio 1 – increasing the show's audience by more than half a million. Within a year, he was also hosting TFI Friday on Channel 4, a celebration of live music, unconventional celebrity interviews, and general wackiness, which heralded the weekend. In a decade that nodded regularly to the 60s and that was defined by increasingly risqué innuendo, Evans was in the vanguard. He also became an emblem of another key feature of the period: getting hammered. As early as December 1995, he caused a stir among Radio 1 bosses when he took his production team – along with celebrity pals Danny Baker and Paul Gascoigne (two other 90s icons) – on an all-night drinking marathon that came to an end just a couple of hours before they were due on air. He was fined a day's wages. The incident set a pattern. But for a while in the mid-90s, that behaviour was not only tolerated, it actually seemed to be part of what was making Britain regain its mojo – an apparently crucial component of the cultural revival, not to mention bedrock of boisterous tabloid legend-making. The economy was on the up, the Tory stuffed shirts were on their way out, Cool Britannia was in – and Evans was in the middle of it, swigging champagne. He partied the night away with celebrities, but (mostly) made it to work in the morning and was cheered on by the nation as he did so. A public supporter of the New Labour project, he was at the intersection of everything that seemed – however briefly – to be brilliant about the country. Becoming an adult in that time, as I did, was to imagine that anything was possible. The people who were making the running (according to popular media, in any case) were not impossibly out of touch: they were people like Chris Evans, downing lager in the pub while deciding which musical artists to showcase to the public on a Friday evening, and making a ton of money. It looked like a blueprint for a happy, if slightly raucous future. In fact, it turned out to be the last hurrah of a pre-digital, pre-9/11 age. It couldn't have lasted anyway; neither Evans nor Britain could keep up the pace. Britain had been lulled into believing that the good times would live forever – and that the country could still function through a fug of drinking, laughing and breaking the rules. When the world became more serious, the example set by Evans and others turned out to be unsustainable – though even now we hark back to it through rose-tinted specs. His spell at Radio 1 ended at the start of 1997 after the station controller lost patience with his frequent absences, well-publicised drinking sessions and demands to have Fridays off. While he was soon back, this time in the same slot for Virgin radio, it was not long before similar controversies arose there. On TV, TFI Friday was also losing its lustre; its original joyful humour feeling increasingly mean-spirited as the decade entered its dog days. When it was announced in the summer of 2000 that the next series would be the last, Evans was no longer in the hotseat – a revolving cast of hosts led the show to its TV grave. A year later, Evans was dismissed by Virgin Radio for the same kind of over-indulgence that had seen him depart the Beeb. As the excesses of the 90s increasingly came to home to roost, Evans – and the Britain he had both championed and become a symbol of – looked broken. While Tony Blair followed the US into a war on terror, Evans retreated from the public eye. By the time of the financial crash in 2008, the joyful raucousness of the twentieth century's final years looked like a blip. Britain has had moments in the sun since – the 2012 Olympics, for instance – but has otherwise spent much of the last 20 years dogged by economic uncertainty, political instability and a painful lack of cohesion around national identity. Evans – who, despite it all, is a brilliant broadcaster – slowly rebuilt his radio presenting reputation. In January 2010, he returned to the breakfast airwaves on Radio 2 – where he found many of those listeners who had once guffawed at his antics on Radio 1. He was older and mostly wiser; so were we. He later switched to Virgin once again. Yet Britain remains in many ways broken by a rollicking decade of which Evans was a remarkable emblem. It wasn't so much that we couldn't handle the party or the booze, but the realisation that the ethos of the 90s wasn't a new normal. We thought the all-nighter would go on and on. Instead, we're still living with the hangover and trying to figure out a different way of doing things.