Nicholas Benbow Evans was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, son of Anthony Evans, director of a motor engineering company, and Eileen, née Whitehouse. He was educated at Bromsgrove School, where he was head boy. He served as a teacher in Senegal with the charity Voluntary Service Overseas for a year, after which he earned a first in law at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Following graduation he worked as a reporter for the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Evening Chronicle before moving to London Weekend Television where he worked on Weekend World and The London Programme and was executive producer of The South Bank Show from 1982 to 1984. During this time he also wrote and adapted screenplays for television broadcast.

Evans married Oxford classmate Jenny Lyon in 1973; they had two children and divorced in the 1990s. He then married singer-songwriter Charlotte Gordon Cumming. They had one child, and he also had a child from a relationship with television producer Jane Hewland.
Evans, Cumming and several of their relatives were poisoned in September 2008 after mistakenly consuming deadly webcap mushrooms that they gathered on holiday in Morayshire. They all had to undergo kidney dialysis, and Evans underwent a transplant in 2011 using a kidney donated by his daughter.
Evans died from a heart attack at his home on 9 August 2022, aged 72. Media sources differed on whether he died in London or in Totnes, Devon.