The Stage

Tuned into the public’s tastes?

Published Friday 19 March 2010 at 11:05 by Chris Bartlett

It has been a tough couple of years for BBC Radio - from the fallout following Sachsgate to the recent announcement that the Corporation plans to shut down niche digital stations 6 Music and the Asian Network. Perhaps the biggest furore, however, has surrounded Chris Evans’ replacement of Terry Wogan on Radio 2’s breakfast show, but, asks Chris Bartlett, has the former enfant terrible been given enough time to prove himself?

Stepping into another person’s shoes is always daunting, but when the shoes in question are the comfortable brogues of one of the nation’s favourite broadcasters, that step becomes a terrifying leap into the unknown.

Which is something Chris Evans discovered when he took over Terry Wogan’s coveted BBC Radio 2 breakfast show in January, a slot the veteran Irish presenter had sat cosily astride for a total of 27 years.

The knives were out even before Evans has uttered a word at breakfast, with newspapers reporting that the BBC switchboard had received “hundreds” of complaints over the announcement at the end of last year that the former Channel 4 TFI Friday host was being given Wogan’s slot.

Two months into the job and the beady, scrutinising eyes are on Evans, waiting for his performance on the breakfast show to prove the naysayers right.

At the end of February, the doubters took Evans’ announcement on air that he was to take an impromptu week-long break from the show - in his words, “We are not having a week off, we are having a think. We are regrouping” - as signs that even the previously unshakable broadcaster was having doubts about the move.

And just last week (March 5), the Daily Mail took great delight in reporting that the Radio 2 messageboards were awash with listeners expressing delight that Evans was away and heaping praise on his replacement, the comparatively vanilla Richard Allinson. Meanwhile, the Mail reported that official complaints had reached 654.

All this comes at a time of increased scrutiny for BBC Radio, with just last month the BBC Trust calling for Radio 2 to do something about the decline in the number of its listeners aged over 65. While, more recently, there was yet more pressure as director-general Mark Thompson’s recommendations to the trust left the guillotine blade hanging over two BBC digital radio stations, BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network.

So Evans is being caught in the crossfire of a far larger battle. But, when you consider who he was succeeding, it was always going to be a Herculean task.

Wogan began hosting Radio 2’s weekday breakfast show in 1972. And, aside from a near decade-long break to make way for his eponymous TV chat show between 1984-93, that’s where he stayed until December 18, 2009. In that time, Wake Up to Wogan had amassed an army of devoted fans - TOGs (Terry’s Old Gals and Geezers) - and had become the most listened to breakfast show in Britain, with 8.1 million people tuning in weekly by the time of his departure.

At first glance, Radio 2, and its controller Bob Shennan, was taking a huge risk by replacing 71-year-old national treasure Wogan with 43-year-old former enfant terrible and tabloid regular Evans, and just more than a year after the “Sachsgate” affair that prompted the resignation of two of its executives - Lesley Douglas and head of specialist music and compliance Dave Barber - and the suspension of Jonathan Ross.

But Evans is a very different broadcaster from the DJ who, during his multimillion-pound tenure on the Radio 1 breakfast show, famously “quit” after a week-long vigil in a nearby pub and who encouraged his colleagues to turn up for work late after nights on the town, all behaviour that Evans himself described as “outrageous” and “delusional” in his recent autobiography It’s Not What You Think.

Evans had settled comfortably into the Radio 2 drivetime slot which marked his triumphant, fully fledged return to weekday BBC Radio in 2006, building up his own loyal early evening audience and, importantly, producing a show that eschewed the rampant egomania of old to instead put its listeners at the heart of the content.

All good preparation for inheriting Wogan’s audience of loyal listening millions, you would think. Well not quite. To Evans’ credit, he started his first Radio 2 breakfast broadcast in conciliatory, olive branch-waving fashion, kicking off the show with two message-laden Beatles songs - All You Need is Love and Got to Get You Into My Life - before heaping praise on his newsreader Moira Stuart, who had parted company with the BBC amid accusations of ageism in 2007, and playing a goodwill message from the TOG-meister Wogan himself.

And the reaction? A generally positive critical response in the press and a very vocal mixed bag of views from the public. But as the next batch of RAJAR figures won’t be with us until May - when Radio 2 bosses will be expecting the usual dip when any long-standing radio slot changes hands - it’s these public reactions that are the best way to see what impact he’s had on Radio 2’s listenership.

As is so often the case when it comes to the reactions of Middle England’s broadcasting consumers, the debate has played out across the letters pages of that most august of publications, the Radio Times. And here the views ranged from negative - one reader found Evans’ “loud, over-enthusiastic voice intolerable”, another thought him too “frenetic” - to the rather more positive. But one correspondent in Leeds raised an important point, namely that, by losing Wogan from breakfast, they’d lost an outlet for “all the daft little things we have noticed on our boring evenings watching the idiot box”. From pointing out the absurdities of Dallas in the early eighties to providing a running commentary on the guff spouted by the judges on MasterChef - or ‘MasterShout’ as the TOGs dubbed it - this is where Wogan’s mildly acerbic skills lay, always tempered by a large dose of easy charm and a big measure of Irish blarney.

It’s true that Evans - a broadcaster who can generate humorous things around him, but who isn’t, in himself, particularly funny - is no match for Wogan in the wit stakes. But Evans is a canny broadcaster and has tried to work his lack of erudition into the show by introducing a spot, called the Bongs of Wrong, which lists the linguistic gaffs and factual errors made by him and his team, and pointed out by listeners.

Evans also has an easy rapport with the listeners who call into his show, especially children, in the successful items he’s imported directly from his drivetime show. Other more frantic items, such as listeners making announcements on-air via a megaphone, have gone down less well. But, on the whole, Evans has tried to reign in his trademark motormouth style.

But, has it worked? Well, as Wogan pointed out himself in recent interviews, where he refused to pass judgement on Evans’ performance, radio is a long-form medium, with shows often taking months, even years, to bed in with listeners and grow.

And since Evans started at breakfast, even his great predecessor has proved he has feet of clay, with his new Radio 2 Sunday morning show Weekend Wogan - an uneasy hybrid of a TV and radio show, with guests and live music recorded in front of an audience at Broadcasting House - debuting on Valentine’s Day to a mixed response.

Only time will tell whether Evans has ensnared enough new listeners to make up for the diehards driven away in search of something milder on their dials. But then Wogan had 27 years to perfect the formula - maybe Evans needs a little longer than two months to make the slot his own.