by Chris Evans
CHRISTOPHER EVANS
versus
THE SCOTTISH MEDIA GROUP
My gripe was that out of my original payment for the radio station and production company, I had agreed to accept forty per cent in cash, and the other sixty per cent in shares. The same shares I foolishly refused to sell to the nice man from Goldman Sachs. These shares were to be paid over three years at a rate of twenty per cent per year, but because we had parted company before the third year, the final third I argued was outstanding.
My lawyers and I then spent £2.2 million – and two years of our lives – working up some argument as to why they might still want to hand these babies over to me.
A couple of days before the case was due in court, I was encouraged to go to arbitration to try to settle things before the case went public and the costs really started to go into hyperdrive.
I found myself sitting around a table in an office, somewhere in the City, face to face with the very gentlemen who had previously almost begged me to sell them my company. And where once we had been allies, we now found ourselves on the verge of the almightiest of legal and financial dingdongs.
The man in charge of arbitration was a qualified QC and a professional peacemaker. Everyone else in a wig and gown was out for the kill, but all he wanted was for the two sides to agree to disagree, shake hands and move on. He quietly advised me to walk away from any further proceedings and expense. He suggested that if I were willing to do that, he was fairly sure he could make the other side see sense and walk away too. He wanted us to shake hands, bury our bad feelings, swallow our legal bills and move on with our lives.
At this juncture, I was in for around £2 million in legal costs and I think SMG were in for almost double that.
‘I have come this far and I am not about to walk away now,’ I said – or something equally as predictable and unconvincing. The nice man rolled his eyes.
Why, oh why, oh why didn’t I listen to him that day?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
The next time I saw the boys from SMG was in the High Court, where Mr Justice Fingers, in all his wisdom, ruled very much in their favour on all counts, in front of the entire nation’s media. Mr Justice Fingers also referred to me as a liar, a bully and a whole list of other nice names in the process, just in case anyone hadn’t quite grasped his point – which, of course, they very much had. In my opinion the judge may have been wrong in some of the things he said. But that didn’t change the fact that I should never have embarked on this ridiculous and self-indulgent course of action.
I swear to this day that I did not lie in court, but what I should have done was wake up and get the hell out of there before we ever got to court. No one wants to hear a multimillionaire asking for more, trying to squeeze the last dregs of dirty dishwater out of a sponge that once contained liquid gold.
I had been at the centre of the deal of a lifetime and for doing something I loved – it doesn’t get any better than that. I should have had the grace to quit whilst I was ahead. And I was well ahead. On the day we went to court, I was worth £83 million. Give or take a few pounds either way.
I used to be a newsagent, for goodness sake. I used to be a paper boy before that and supplement my wages to the tune of £1.50 by collecting the bills every Friday night. I was a kissogram for a year or so, for £6 a time. When and where did I lose the bloody plot? Of course the judge was going to rule against me – I would have ruled against me, for crying out loud!
As a consequence of the verdict my final bill for this whole fiasco would hit £13 million, as on top of my legal bill I had to pay SMG a fair chunk of money. That’s £11 million more than the day the nice arbitrator whispered in my ear that I might want to reconsider my position before going ahead.
Though I was worth a lot of money on paper, I didn’t have enough ready cash to pay the lawyers, which resulted in me having to sell my much-laboured-over wow-house, the Surrey house, the one it took me a lifetime to buy and two years to refurbish, the one on which I had lavished so much attention and energy, the one I had turned into a dream house with its Italian stone bath, waterfall in the library and replica pub bar. Bill and I had lived in it for less than a year.
And painful as that was, I hadn’t finished with my financial self-flagellation.
After the sluice gates of my bank account had finally closed again, I was left with a couple of more modest properties and a piece of land in Portugal, but the majority of my personal wealth was held in the remaining ten million shares I still retained in SMG. I know, I thought, I’ll hold onto these shares and watch their value soar and as result I will mitigate my recent losses without having to lift a finger. And everything will be alright.
Sadly I was wrong. Just how wrong, I would learn to my cost.
At the peak of their value my shares were worth £3.76 each, so that’s £37.6 million in all. What I should have done, as we now know, was sell them there and then, because soon afterwards they began to slide and they didn’t stop. The all-powerful market began to sniff that this company was no longer what it had once been, or indeed promised to be. A couple of years later my shares had fallen to a new all-time low of £1.30. ‘What a silly boy,’ I thought to myself. £13 million, where there had once been £37.6 million. I felt sick. But not as sick as I did a few months after that. The price was now down to 60 pence. I couldn’t think about it, and yet, of course that’s all I did. But still I didn’t sell – I was in total denial.
A year later they were down to 27 pence.
‘What do I do now?’ I thought. I tried to find a way out, one which could be construed as my snatching victory from the salivating jaws of defeat. And then I saw a car, a car that was both beautiful and may well go up in value in the future, but the point was that it was something as opposed to pieces of paper that were increasingly becoming worthless.
‘Why don’t I cash in my chips now, after I pay the tax I’ll have just about enough money left for this thing of beauty. And then I can look at it every day and think – well, at least I got that for all my efforts from the deal of a lifetime.’
But no, surely the shares simply had to go back up. Isn’t that what share dealing is about, not losing your nerve? I put the idea of the trophy car on the back burner.
So with my shares now down to a value of just over £2 million after tax, I still didn’t sell. Can you spot a pattern here? When they slipped to an unthinkable eleven pence, the car was no longer an option. When they tanked to five pence, I was beyond incredulous. Whereas a few months before I wouldn’t have thought twice about my shares fluctuating by a million, I was now literally losing sleep over a few thousand pounds. It was time to set myself free.
The day I instructed my accountant to sell, my shares were worth just over three pence each.
Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha!
Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, boo-hoo!
Out of the original deal in which I made £83 million, I had successfully lost £74 million of it. And you know what? It was all my fault – period. I have been blessed with a sharp mind and more than my fair share of good fortune. There is no reason, no reason on this earth, why I couldn’t have bitten my tongue, put my head down and finished my contract.
After that I could have made a clean break, sold up and headed out of town. Instead I decided to fight, for all the wrong reasons. And I ended up worth less than the day I had bought the station from Richard Branson.
But here’s the thing, as I sit here today, I am genuinely happier. I look back and think, what a fantastic story, what a load of stuff and nonsense, what a clever and silly boy you have been, all at the same time. And if I achieved all that without even really trying, what can I achieve in the next ten years now that I know a thing or two?
I have friends who live in the past and talk about what might have been and I have to say they’re really dull, sappers not zappers; in fact I’ve dropped most of them. The past is gone, it’s dead. Learn from it or forget about it, but whatever you
do, don’t dwell on it. Such thoughts will only hijack the present and cast the future into doubt. Athletes don’t save energy for races they’ve already run.
When it comes to money, I’ve always had a very simple theory. When we are asleep we are all as rich or poor as the next person. When we are having sex, or writing at our computers, having a pee or watching telly, money is of no importance whatsoever. It’s only possible to actually be rich for a very small percentage of each day, and that’s usually when paying the bills.
So yes, I do still confess to having nice things in my life but if they all had to go tomorrow, it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.
By definition, if you win, you will eventually also lose. It’s not a probability, it’s a fact.
TOP
10
SATURDAY NIGHT TELEVISION TREATS
10 Generation Game
9 Mike Yarwood in Persons
8 The A-Team
7 Stars in their Eyes
6 Only Fools and Horses
5 Blind Date
4 Match of the Day
3 Jim’ll Fix It
2 Noel’s House Party
1 Doctor Who
THE FIRST TIME I HEARD THE WORDS ‘Doctor Who’ come out of Bill’s mouth was in the kitchen of our cottage.
Though we’d had to sell the big house to a very private Russian man, after the nice QC tried to tell me not to go to court because I would get my arse spanked by the long-suffering Scottish chaps, we still managed to retain almost three-quarters of the estate.
The very private Russian man, you see, the one who turned up to view the place in an armour-plated vehicle with a car either side and two motorcycle outriders, had only wanted the big house and the nice Gertrude Jekyll gardens. He wasn’t remotely interested in the farmland over the road and the various buildings thereon, and I was not about to quibble over such a trifling matter. He had the cash, I had the house and we both coveted each other’s booty. Besides, I was very much aware of the strange-looking bulges underneath the jackets of his four bodyguards – always a useful negotiating image to bring to the table.
Having said that, I have never come across anyone straighter to deal with. He was polite to my staff, paid up on time and was never any bother thereafter. In fact I’ve never set eyes on him since; you can’t be less bother than that.
In the middle of this remaining land were several buildings, one of which was a three-bedroom cottage, officially called the Pump House but known to Bills and me as Christmas Cottage, as it’s where we got it together on Christmas Day when we first met. It was small but perfectly formed, and it was here that we now resided. We may have come down a peg or two in terms of square footage – from 12,000 square feet to less than a tenth of that – but what we had lost in floor area we had gained in acres. Our little love-nest was set in a 120 acres, to be precise – so we were by no means slumming it.
In the whitewashed interior of the Pump House, Billie and I were joined by four dogs: our two mad little lurchers, Percy and Epstein, an ex-racing greyhound called Rita and my faithful German shepherd, Enzo. It was a tight squeeze but we were all friends, the fur and the flesh rubbed along fine together.
One afternoon during this harmonious idyll Bill arrived back from a meeting in London. She ran in breathless and stood in front of me looking like she was about to burst. ‘Babe, they’re remaking Doctor Who and they want me to audition for the part of his assistant,’ she said.
‘Wow, that’s fantastic,’ I replied.
‘Well, what do you think?’ she asked.
‘I think yes is what I think, yes, definitely.’
The more Billie told me about the new Doctor Who, the people involved in it and their plans for the show, the more it sounded like the dream job she’d been waiting for.
Bill was, however, apprehensive about a number of things, because it was a sci-fi show and a long-running franchise. Sci-fi could be notoriously nerdy and with a franchise comes the potential to be typecast. But we both knew these were minimal downsides when compared with the potential upside of a successful primetime dramatic hit.
Bill was trying not to be excited – one of her many charming traits – but her disobedient smile was betraying her.
‘I’ll go for the audition and take it from there,’ she said, attempting to play it down. It wasn’t working; we both knew this was a very big deal. But I don’t think either of us realised then that it would cement Billie Piper as one of the most successful television actors of her generation.
Two auditions and a screen test later she was offered the part of the Doctor’s assistant, Rose, playing opposite the new Doctor, Christopher Eccleston. It was a huge break and we were both thrilled, but as is so often the case, success was to come at a price.
TOP
10
MOMENTS WHEN YOU KNOW YOU HAVE TO LET GO
10 Before the rest of the world tells you
9 Before you begin to hurt each other
8 Before you have any children/any more children
7 Before you stop having sex
6 Before arguing becomes your sole form of communication
5 Before one of you has an affair
4 Before you begin to forget why it was you got together
3 Before you fall out of love
2 Before you stop seeing the good in each other
1 Before you stop being friends
BILL’S HEAVY FILMING SCHEDULE required her to move to Cardiff for the majority of the time, early starts and late nights meant it could be no other way. We discussed the situation, of course, and how it might affect our relationship but I, of all people, knew that when this business of ours calls, it very rarely rings back to ask again. Bill had to do whatever it took to get the job done.
The producers rented her a lovely pad in the same building as the Welsh songstress Charlotte Church. ‘She’s crazy,’ Billie said, in one of our first telephone conversations after she’d headed West. ‘Good crazy, but really, really crazy.’
Over those first few weeks, filming went well, in fact better than well. The word from everyone was that Billie was not only a real star but a joy to work with – no surprise to anyone who really knew her, yet lovely to hear nevertheless.
Filming takes for ever though and you have to be a certain breed of individual to cope with that, especially if you’re an actor.
Bill would hang around for hours, or even days, in full wardrobe and make-up waiting to deliver a single line. Here’s where the skill lies. How do you retain the same mood, voice and energy when your lines might be two days apart? I could probably cope with directing because the director is always busy, but acting – no thank you. I take my hat off to anyone who does it.
This wasn’t the first time Bill had been away on location. She’d made a couple of movies, one of them a horror movie in Romania. I flew out to surprise her one night and ended up getting smashed with the crew whilst watching England in the quarter-finals of the World Cup. At least I think that’s what it was – I can’t quite remember.
But while previously she’d been away for a few weeks at a time time, the shooting schedule for Doctor Who was to last for a whole nine months. This is a considerable length of time to spend apart from someone who you got together to be with, rather than without. Not only that but I have to confess to not being the missing type, I never have been. I suppose this could be little more than the thinly veiled veneer of a much deeper self defence mechanism. When situations change I tend to change with them, rather than sit there wishing they hadn’t and questioning why they had. Moreover when I see further inevitable change upon the horizon, it’s the waiting for that change to arrive that I can’t bear, often causing me to precipitate and even expedite that change sooner rather than later.
Could I sense us drifting apart or had it already happened, with geography now being the excuse for us doing something about it? I think this is more likely the case. Age gaps can be sustained in relationships when the two parties are older
I think, but when a young girl has her prime years ahead of her, it is a foolish older man who chooses to deny rather than admit the potential for calamity all round. When I first met Bill even though she was so much younger, we had more things in common then than we were beginning to have now. We were less about ourselves and more about each other. We had met coming from opposite directions but at the same crossroads and now it was time for us to turn and go our separate ways. To pretend it was otherwise would have been to delude ourselves and each other, as well as putting at risk everything we’d gained from being together.
There was no question that our falling in love and the fixing of each other, was entirely a good, beautiful, wonderful and exciting thing for both of us, but in simple terms our work was done. We were ready to move on. Bill was already off and running. She was becoming her own person once again, for the first time in a long time; maybe even for the first time in her life.
Therefore, all things considered, it’s no surprise there was no flashpoint, there was no blazing row, there was no screaming and shouting and declaration of a mutual love now lost. There was just one night after dinner, when I made a trip to Cardiff to spend a night with my wife.
Bill and I went out for dinner and came back at around half nine. She had been her usual wonderful self throughout the evening, and I couldn’t help thinking that she looked particularly beautiful.
We settled down on the sofa to watch the telly. The golf was on. It was the final day of the Masters.
‘Oh goody, golf,’ she joked. ‘I love it when you watch golf, it’s so cute.’
I believe she genuinely did love it when I watched golf because she knew it was something I’d had a passion for since I was a little boy, when I saved up for months to buy a secondhand five-iron from the local junk shop.
Bill fell asleep whenever we watched anything on television, but she did so particularly quickly when it came to golf, and seeing as she had an early start the next day I couldn’t help feeling that I was inadvertently doing her a favour. Minutes, maybe even only seconds later, she was fast asleep, her head in my lap.