Art Craft and Leisure news

Having stepped away from the spotlight for more than a year, Welsh tenor and broadcaster Wynne Evans talks to Antonia LeVay about preparing to reconnect with audiences on a mini-tour of Wales this month.

Wynne Evans has been reinventing his life in ways he never expected, including fulfilling a childhood dream. “I’ve just bought an ice cream van,” he tells Buzz. “It’s called The Tipsy Cone and it’ll sell alcoholic ice cream, espresso martini, piña colada, mojito, Aperol spritz. When I was seven I promised myself I’d buy one, so I finally did.”

The Tipsy Cone will join Evans’ Carmarthen restaurant The Welsh House (“I design dishes for the restaurant – although it’s stressful because you have to design them so your weakest chef can cook them perfectly”) and his online radio station, The Wynne Evans Show, in his portfolio of interests. A broadcaster since the early 2010s, he’s recently joined Welsh station Dragon Radio on Sundays, and this month embarks on a five-date Welsh tour promising “music, songs, stories and laughter” and titled Beyond Compare.

“I’ve been out of circulation for about a year and a half, so I’m coming back gently,” he says. “Welsh audiences are really important to me, so this feels like dipping my toe back in. I have to be careful because I’ve had serious mental health battles over the past year.”

This relates to Evans parting ways with the BBC in January 2025 shortly before the launch of a Strictly Live tour – he’d been a contestant on the previous series of Strictly Come Dancing – and being dropped from his most (in)famous role, as operatic Go.Compare advert avatar Gio Campario, in the process. It stemmed from an incident while promoting Strictly Live, reported in the press as being a sexual comment to a colleague; later that year, in an interview and via his social media, Evans defended himself, saying the comment was a misunderstanding.

“Right up until October I was struggling badly,” he says now. “I actually tried to take my own life and ended up in hospital for three days. It’s been a brutal year. My friends, my girlfriend and my kids have been incredible. But when you’re in that dark place, you don’t think about those things. Sometimes you feel like you deserve to be there.

“I’ve had panic attacks live on air and had to say, ‘I need a moment.’ The more people talk about mental health, the better. For me, it’s exercise, singing, getting outside and not isolating myself. In many ways this tour is part of my healing process. I’ll never return to television as long as I live, but live performance is where my heart is. It felt so unfair that everything had come as a result of a lie, but I had to make a decision – am I going to hide forever, or get back out there and get on with my life? I decided it was time.”

A huge part of that decision has been the support of his fans, known as the ‘Wynners’, who have stayed in his corner. That support helped inspire Evans to launch his own radio station. “It was a punt in the dark! One afternoon, I decided that in two weeks I’d launch my own station. People said I was mad – the licences, the music reporting, everything – but I’d worked in radio for 15 years, so I thought I could do it. Now we’ve got more listeners than some very big stations, which feels incredible.

“It’s all part of being my own boss now. I can choose what I do, when I do it and who I work with. Some people have stepped away from me, which surprised me, but others have really stood by me.”

There’s a sense of community around the station, where listeners connect through humour as much as shared experience. “Everyone gets a nickname when they join,” he says. “People know each other by those names, and some have become real friends. We organise walks where hundreds turn up and joke that the show improves pets’ mental health. People say their dogs, cats and even pigs listen. I’ve got a dog myself, Ginny – she’s asleep behind me right now.”

“We did a spoof [on air] saying I’d had twins,” he laughs. “I’d Googled my symptoms after feeling ill and it told me I might be pregnant, so I ran with it and announced the ‘birth’ live on air with an AI photo. Within three minutes the Daily Mail were on the phone asking who the mother was. When they realised they’d been tricked, they tried to turn it into a negative story… but everyone else was in on the joke.

“When I left the BBC it was very public, and the media are very quick to write bad stories but nobody wants to celebrate the good ones. The heating once broke for a day at my restaurant – immediately it was ‘Evans in trouble’. They rang me for comment, and I said we could talk about that, or we could talk about the fact we were opening on Christmas Day to give free meals to people who couldn’t afford it. They chose the heating. When it’s as transparent as that, people begin to see what’s happening. The support from the Wynners and the public has been amazing.”

Music has come back into sharper focus. After years away from classical, Evans says he’s rediscovered his love for it (“Making it more accessible is really important to me”), and that renewed passion will soon take him back to where it all began. “Next year I’ll be performing a full opera at a major opera house – my first in over 10 years. I can’t say what it is yet! But it’s very exciting.”

As for May’s Beyond Compare tour? “It’ll be a proper night of entertainment. Stories from my career I’ve never told before, singing with a live band, and a lot of humour. “If people take the time to come out and see me, then it’s my job to give them a brilliant night. We’ll have an absolute ball.”

Wynne Evans, Savoy Theatre, Monmouth, Wed 20 May; Y Muni, Pontypridd, Thurs 21; The Gate Arts Centre, Cardiff, Fri 22; Brangwyn Hall, Swansea, Sat 23; Albert Hall, Llandrindod Wells, Sun 24.

Tickets: prices vary. Info: here

words ANTONIA LEVAY

My Body Is A Meadow is an ode to our natural world and a sharp and urgent call for an open and accessible landscape. By binding poetry to prose and memoir to manifesto, Bethany Handley writes a deeply perceptive account of her journey accessing the south Wales countryside since becoming a wheelchair user.

Handley, an award-winning writer, poet and disability activist, is also a naturalist; she embodies her environment so much that she becomes it. Each passage is a gift that reveals something sobering: the systems in which we live have long been gatekeepers. Architectural barriers (such as gates, stiles and steep terrain), everyday ableism and the perpetual ecocide are all disabling tools to us and our planet. Accessing nature should not be this difficult: we are nature ourselves and belong in our landscapes.

While doctors, policymakers, and non-disabled people pressure Handley into overcoming her conditions, she embarks on a journey of radical acceptance. Wheeling through the Welsh countryside among mountains and rivers, she makes space for all of her feelings as she learns that “grief and joy can co-exist”. Compelling and change-making, this book is an essential read for those who love the outdoors.

With a new book out this month and a packed intercontinental schedule to promote it, including a couple of Welsh stops, bestselling author Matt Haig keeps a cool head and gives Julia Bottoms some of his time.

Against the backdrop of his son’s spotless, whitewashed bedroom in his Brighton home, Matt Haig just might be the picture image of the modern writer. He speaks as he writes – frankly, with little filter – about personal anxieties and work-related pressures, Instagram and writing bestselling novels from the living room sofa.

He also speaks of his new novel, The Midnight Train. Structurally, the novel mirrors the narrative architecture of A Christmas Carol, centering 81-year old Wilbur Budd who, on the brink of his death, discovers a train that can take him back in time to relive his most important moments.

If Haig were to relive the most important moments of his life, which might he choose? Career-wise, there is no shortage. He might return to 2010, when he was dropped by his publisher for writing The Radleys, a fantasy novel about a family of vampires, only to find another publisher and achieve his breakthrough. Or perhaps 2015, the year he published bestseller-to-be Reasons To Stay Alive, his candid account of a depressive episode that brought him to the brink of suicide.

Or to 2020, when he wrote The Midnight Library, about a woman who explores alternate versions of her life through a mysterious library. The book sold nearly 14 million copies, but inspired as much expectation as success. “Some people out there loved it, some people thought I was the worst writer to have ever lived,” Haig recalls. Struggling to know what to write next, he fell into a creative slump and took a year off. “I had an existential crisis and was in therapy for a while” – which helped, as did deleting social media. 

The Midnight Train exists in the same cinematic universe, but – as Haig emphasises – “It’s not really a sequel. It comes to a completely different conclusion to The Midnight Library – it’s having an argument with it, in terms of what it’s saying about life.” It also fulfils his long-standing desire to write a love story – and a time travel story. 

These days, Haig has returned to social media, but confines himself to Instagram, where he posts daily content from life updates to long reflections on mental health, Trump, AI and plenty more. Yet he feels “on the brink of pulling the plug”. Over the past decade, Haig has been subjected to sustained trolling, accused of mansplaining feminism, monetising mental health, even becoming embroiled in a plagiarism conspiracy.

“If I regret anything, it’s that for 10 years I was arguing with people and making enemies on X.” Sticking to Instagram seems to have helped. “I don’t have nervous breakdowns like I did when I was arguing with everyone online.”

Haig seems bracketed in the public consciousness as a frank, unembellished storyteller and steady literary guide amid life’s turbulence. Yet in person, he is somewhat self-contradictory: confident yet self-conscious, he interjects yet apologises for straying even a centimetre from my questions. “Writers, I think, are naturally quite private, introverted and shy people, but you’re expected to have this other life,” he says. “That public persona thing – I’m not good at it. I feel like I fundamentally disappoint people.” 

Still, the author appears more at ease in the context of in-person events, almost 30 of which are booked for the coming weeks – two Welsh dates featured amidst visits to Germany and the USA. At Hay, he’s also set to join Adrian Chiles, Dawn French and Hugh Bonneville on Radio 4’s Saturday Live programme. It’s 20 years since his first Hay appearance – when, he recalls, “there were zero people there to see me on the panel.” This year, he can expect a few more. 

Matt Haig, Savoy Theatre, Monmouth, Fri 15 May (tickets: £12; info: here); Hay Festival, Fri 22 May (tickets: £16. Info: here)

The Midnight Train is published by Canongate on Thurs 21 May. Info: here

words JULIA BOTTOMS