Chris Evans: Readers Reply

YES

Chris Evans is clearly an integral part of modern popular culture. His rejection of the conventions of taste and decency on television is something to be admired, not criticised. Why shouldn't everyday conversations, which are littered with swear words and cheeky gossip, be depicted on television? After all, Evans appears on "progressive" Channel 4.

Rayna Barker

Peterborough

I am, quite honestly, sick to the back teeth of let's-keep-within-the guidelines DJs like Noel "lovely haircut, I've had it 35 years" Edmonds. It seems quite obvious that people need Chris Evans.

Mark Ward

Nottingham

Why attack one of the few media personalities who matters? Don't defend an insipid media circus of squeaky-clean, dross-laden, corporate geeks with hyper-egos - Evans is the antidote to all this, our culture's saviour. Did George Best give up football because he had too many girlfriends? So Evans got drunk and slept in for work. Oh, the shame!

Neil Bullock

Newcastle upon Tyne

Considering the hundreds of hours of broadcasting on national TV and radio in recent years by Chris Evans, you seem to have little evidence to support your assertion that he has been "corrupted by power". Chris Evans is that rarest of things, a British success story, an individual with a genuine Midas touch. Wouldn't we rather accept him, warts and all, rather than the sanitised banality of so much that passes for entertainment in this country? His 7 million Radio 1 listeners seem to think so.

Greg Walsh

Wembley

NO

In 1945, George Orwell wrote: "When I was a child, I cut a wasp in half. It paid no attention but simply carried on sucking jam on my plate, while the jam trickled through its severed oesophagus: only when it tried to fly away did it realise the dreadful thing that had happened to it ..." Watching, in Evans's endlessly self-referential, three-second world, his boneheaded, scattershot celebration of the trivial, the moronic and the incidentally cruel, I think I know how the wasp felt. What ever happened to a broadcasting culture that wasn't obsessed with itself?

Blanaid McKinney

Macduff, Aberdeenshire

Chris Evans is merely a symptom of the cultural malaise that presently dominates Western capitalism, which gives huge financial rewards to the thinnest of "talent"; where "talent" itself has become a synonym for "ordinariness"; and where money is the only real benchmark. Small wonder Evans (the "pretend" rebel who threatens nobody but those he deems his inferiors), suffers from morbid insecurity, since he has constantly to weave "something" out of what is very little to begin with, and nobody must know this more than he does.

Dave Godin

Sheffield

Chris Evans is laughing all the way to the bank. He enjoys reminding us of this as he tastelessly bludgeons his way through his daily shows, bullying and insulting everyone with apparent impunity. Unfortunately, the BBC chooses to pay this egocentric megalomaniac vast sums of public money to parade his values on prime-time radio.

Perhaps Evans is merely providing his audiences with what they want to hear: a simple case of supply and demand. I only wish that he would confine his efforts to the commercial sector so that true market forces could determine who really needs him.

Bob Phillips

Bristol