The publishing schedules for October contain a memoir called Top Fear, in which Chris Evans is billed to report on the task of taking over the world’s most famous TV motoring show.
After tweeting that he is leaving Top Gear, Evans will now have more time to write the book – although there must be some doubt as to whether he can bear to describe the ordeal.
Evans should perhaps conclude that the greatest failure of his broadcasting career so far – the car crash of Top Gear – came about because he failed to understand his greatest success: the triumphant succession to Sir Terry Wogan on the Radio 2 breakfast show.
Evans won over Wogan’s old geezers and gals – or replaced them with enough new listeners of his own – by being notably different from him in age, tone and approach. But in taking over from Clarkson, he strangely aimed for karaoke, even mimicking his predecessor’s dad jeans and plunging final cadences in sentences.
But while Evans must now consider himself silly to have accepted the deal, BBC managers are at serious fault for ever offering it. The vacancy had notoriously been created by Clarkson shouting at and punching a junior producer, the last in a series of stand-offs with BBC bosses who saw him as editorially reckless and a man with too much control over the show.
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