Date: 10 January 1994
Originally published in: Daily Mail (UK)
Written by:
Co-hosting The Big Breakfast left Kim Wilde with a big problem – she was terrified.
But her mother persuaded her to go ahead as a stand-in for Gaby Roslin… and the blonde pop star fell in love with the show’s presenter Chris Evans.
‘After I agreed to do it, I became petrified’, she recalled yesterday. ‘A few days before the first show, I decided to pull out. I couldn’t cope with presenting a live programme. Fortunately, my mum talked me round and told me to get out there and have a go. From the moment I arrived on set the team – and especially Chris – were fantastic. He helped me through it all.
‘Pulling that off changed my life. I will always consider it a turning point, not just because I met Chris, but because I felt that I had really achieve something special. I’d always walked away from risks. Now there’s no holding me back.’
Her romance with 29-year-old Evans is now over but Miss Wilde says he is ‘one of the most fantastic people I’ve ever known – just a brilliant guy.’
It was claimed the 33-year-old singer had jetted in the Austrian ski resort of St. Anton to help mend her broken heart. In fact, she said, she was keeping a long-standing holiday date with her brother and sister.
The split with Evans was ‘a mutual thing’, she added. ‘All this talk of one or other of us being dumped is rubbish. We both have an extremely hectic time ahead of us workwise and decided to part so we could concentrate on that. We’re still the very best of friends.’
