Monthly media and arts column

It was announced on September 7: Terry Wogan is due to step down from presenting the long-running Wake up with Wogan breakfast show at the end of the year and Chris Evans will be moving to the slot from his present Drivetime show, also on Radio 2.

Both have big fan bases but Wogan’s is bigger. Chris has five million regular listeners and Wogan has eight million. The BBC presumably hope that Evans will bring his five million and gain some survivors from Wogan to maintain present listening figures, but not everybody thinks this will happen. ‘Evans is all very well in the afternoon when your brain is fried’, said one Drivetime listener, ‘but to have him first thing in the morning would be unbearable’.

Funnily enough it turns out that in my new-found-land of the countryside there is Chris Evans’ history just around the corner. My daughter does ballet in the same village that he and Billie Piper lived in during his years of disgrace! To get to my home group, I drive past the very pub where he was discovered drinking when he had phoned in sick! They should probably give it a blue plaque.

Like the kettle

I tend to listen to Radio 2 when I need cheering up and when Radio 4 is just a little bit serious to do the job. Terry Wogan is entertainment light. He is inoffensive, affable and cheery. He doesn’t outstay his welcome. He is, as he described himself, ‘like the kettle or the wallpaper. 90% of people aren’t really listening, I’m droning in the background of their lives. They know what they’re going to get; they know I’m not going to offend them. It’s just me. Just there, like an old chair’.

Not like an old chair

Chris Evans is not like an old chair. If he had to be compared to something you sit on, it would probably be the driving seat of one of his vintage Ferraris: immodest, over-priced and unlikely to go the distance. He has the reputation for unpredictable, uncomfortable listening, with a history of humiliating others for laughs. He has lived and talked a wealthy showbiz lifestyle of drunkenness, drugs and gross misconduct, with a string of failed marriages and broken contracts behind him.

Incensed

It isn’t surprising, therefore, that Terry’s TOGs are incensed by the BBC’s choice of Evans to replace him. They were quick with their negative reactions: ‘The show will lose the majority of its listeners immediately they hear Evans’s brand of broadcasting’. One Wogan fan commented: ‘His normal market isn’t awake at that time anyway’. There is also the competition that will ensue between between the two Chrises: Chris Evans’s Radio 2 show will have to compete for listeners with Chris Moyles, who is presenting the Radio 1 Breakfast show at the same time. Both appeal to the same laddish type of audience. The outcome of the BBC’s controversial choice of Evans over more sedate types such as Simon Mayo may be simply to split Moyles’s existing audience and lose Wogan’s completely.

How they make us feel

How to respond? As a Christian, I can’t help but base my main response to all of this on the following question: ‘Does listening to this presenter help me to live as a Christian or do they draw me further away from God in my thinking?’ Neither Wogan nor Evans are Christians. Neither of them aim to support Christians in their daily relationship with the Lord.

Both of them have publicly rejected God and his claim over their lives. Both use God’s name as a swear word on air. Both like to undermine authority and criticise others who have no right of reply. Both of them do this on huge salaries that are paid for by you and me through the licence fee. I’m not saying that we should all automatically switch over to Premier Radio (although that’s not a bad idea), but it’s interesting that our reactions to people are often based on how they make us feel, rather than on how God feels about them.

A generation thing

It’s all the precious concerns of an older generation anyway, isn’t it? Even Chris Evans isn’t such a new phenomenon at the age of 42! While writing this article, I was online looking around on the web at articles when Charlotte from our old youth group messaged me on Facebook.

She’s just done her A levels and she hadn’t heard of either Chris Evans or Terry Wogan. I almost swallowed my net book. No, she has other newbies to be scathing about. She’s overcome with rage about how well John and Edward are doing on the X Factor.

Eleanor Margesson

© Evangelicals Now - December 2009
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