THE world is divided, it seems, between people who love Chris Evans and those who have failed to notice that he’s moved on from his partying years and persist in judging him on his past. A talented broadcaster who’s added a million listeners to Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with his flair for invention and his irrepressible optimism, what was most striking in his Hay appearance was not just how utterly satisfyingly Chris Evans he is - what you hear is what you get - but also how much more there is. Self-aware but not self-obsessed, thankful for what he has but no gloater, proud of his achievements but lacking any arrogance. For those who are used to spending every morning in his company, an hour simply wasn’t long enough.
And it clearly wasn’t long enough for Chris, either, as he announced on Tuesday morning’s Breakfast Show that he’d be back in 2011 - with the show.
The following evening Ruby Wax offered an equally packed house a show that couldn’t have been more different. Where Chris Evans’s anecdotes revealed that if there were a manual for life he’d have torn it up and written his own, Ruby Wax in Losing It with Judith Owens, took us on a whistle stop tour of life with bi-polar disorder, a tour for which she felt horribly ill-equipped without a manual provided at any stage.
The show opened with a glimpse of the Ruby Wax we thought we knew, extracting the laughter the audience had come to find, and that’s where Losing It becomes something of an oddity - as a dissection of a nervous breakdown Wax cleverly fillets her own life, but in doing so leaves a large part of her audience losing the plot themselves as they struggle to work out just what it is they’re watching. The poignant musical interludes from Judith Owens were a touching and beautifully sung counterpoint, but, slouched at the piano with hunched shoulders and a mournful expression, she could have been Madge, Edna Everage’s long-suffering foil, a mystifying pose especially when Ruby Wax is living proof of how hard people work to disguise a crumbling psyche.
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