Is Chris Evans the BBC’s ‘new Jonathan Ross’?

Is Chris Evans, the one-time enfant terrible of British broadcasting, being lined up as the next Jonathan Ross? Evans, who in January replaced Sir Terry Wogan as Radio 2's weekday breakfast show host, is to sit in for Adrian Chiles, the co-presenter of BBC1's prime-time programme The One Show, on Friday nights.

Late last year it emerged that producers were looking at overhauling the hour-long Friday night edition of The One Show, which Chiles presents with Christine Bleakley, by giving it more of an entertainment focus.

The new job will see Evans, the former Radio One breakfast DJ, firmly back in the bosom of the BBC as well as returning to the kind of populist role which made him a massive star in the mid-Nineties, presenting entertainment shows such as The Big Breakfast and Don't Forget Your Toothbrush.

But the last time Evans tried to juggle both a full-time radio job with a Friday night shift in television - as the host of Channel 4's TFI Friday - it went spectacularly wrong. Evans dramatically quit his Radio 1 breakfast show job on-air in 1997 because the Corporation had reportedly refused to let him have Fridays off to work on his Channel 4 show.

Evans, who became Britain's wealthiest entertainer in 2000 when he sold his Ginger Media Group production company for £285m, dropped out of broadcasting between 2002 and 2005 after several high-profile spats with various employers.

In 2001 he was fired from his job as Virgin Radio's breakfast show host after he repeatedly failed to turn up for work following several well-publicised drinking binges. Evans had been photographed with his young wife, the actress Billie Piper, at a pub when he had claimed he was too ill to present the show.

Ross, one of the BBC's highest-paid stars, quit in January, and the Corporation will be hoping to avoid a similar fiasco. But at 44, Evans has mellowed and is now seen as one of the BBC's biggest mainstream entertainers. ·