It was the day after Channel 4 announced the relaunch with the 'interesting' pairing of Rick Adams and Sharron Davies. It was in all the tabloids the next day, and Chris was running through them in a link and mentioned the new presenter partnership and said something along the lines of "hey, I know I'm now on the radio against them, but I still love the show - but what on earth are they doing hiring Sharron Davies - are they going to turn it into a sports show?"
I remember when it fell off the air for about half an hour in 1995, they ended up showing a bit of the standby emergency tape which included clips of the Evans era, and someone phoned him up to tell him he was back on The Big Breakfast, but the one I most remember was in the summer of 1996, as Dan McGrath was married to Lisa Clark, the incoming Big Breakfast editor, and Evans said that they'd reveal "exactly what's going on with The Big Breakfast", and Clark came on the phone to talk about what the revamp was going to be like and was adamant that Zoe would be staying, which of course she didn't. I faithfully noted it all down in my diary.
This is possibly a bit OT for this thread, but of course 20 years later, Evans hired Lisa Clark as the executive producer of his Top Gear reboot but she left before the show went on air. This was one of the ‘troubles’ that beset that production, sadly, and it meant that the aforementioned Dan McGrath piled into Evans on social media and it turned the ‘old team’ against Evans once again, with their relationships presumably already being strained from the 2001 ‘firing’ incident.
It’s funny that 20 years on from Radio 1 and the Big Breakfast, and 15 years on from the Virgin Radio incidents, these people kept interlocking - of course, John Revell also stuck his head above the parapet and was extremely anti-Evans in the press at this point too.
