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Television and radio presenter Chris Evans is to become the new host of Britain’s globally-popular Top Gear TV motoring show, replacing Jeremy Clarkson who was dropped by the BBC in March after he attacked a producer.
Evans has signed a three-year deal to lead the show which is aired in Bahrain and more than 200 other countries and watched by 350 million viewers worldwide.
Filming will begin in a few weeks’ time, the BBC said, without Clarkson’s co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May.
Evans, 49, who owns a multi-million pound car collection and has a penchant for Ferraris, said he was thrilled to get the job on his ‘favourite programme of all time’.
“I promise I will do everything I possibly can to respect what has gone on before and take the show forward,” he said, adding he would continue to work as a radio DJ for the BBC as well.
Evans said that he now hopes to find his new co-hosts through open auditions. He said anyone from anywhere in the world with ‘a real appetite for cars’ could apply, regardless of whether they were ‘famous people’ or not. “If you’re up for it, we want to hear from you,” he added.
Evans, who had ruled himself out of hosting the show back in March, is a friend of 55-year-old Clarkson, whose strong opinions and off-colour remarks generated both complaints and profits for Britain’s publicly-funded broadcaster.
Evans too has endured negative headlines. Prominent in the 1990s, Evans hosted popular UK shows such as the Big Breakfast and TFI Friday as well the BBC’s flagship Radio 1 breakfast show with a laddish humour that sometimes landed him in trouble. He quit the Radio 1 show in 1997 after the BBC refused to give him Fridays off work.
Evans has reinvented himself in recent years as a more reliable host, returning to TV and enjoying a successful spell presenting the BBC’s Radio 2 breakfast show since 2010.
Top Gear is syndicated around the world and is one of the BBC’s most successful and lucrative programmes, generating overseas sales worth £50 million (BD30 million) a year.
