Sir Terry Wogan, who has died aged 77, was the most popular and best-loved broadcaster in Britain for more than three decades, confecting a middlebrow, old-fashioned brand of gentle Irish whimsy that barely concealed his forthright and often antagonistic views about the BBC and the people who run it.
For Wogan’s wit and wisdom worked against the grain of the organisation that had plucked him from obscurity in Dublin, where he had read the radio news and announced the programmes, and magicked him into a broadcasting superstar.
He loved what he had become, considered his abundant rewards to be richly deserved but (a well-worn symptom of a familiar syndrome) often felt unloved and insufficiently cherished, as when he agreed to present awards to the craftsmen of his trade – cameramen, sound technicians and the like – for no fee, merely the price of a hotel room. When he discovered that the deal was just that – room only, no breakfast (the price of which he had to stump up himself from his reported £800,000 salary) – he considered himself badly done by.
While there was something in what the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had to say when Wogan finally laid down his crown on his Radio 2 breakfast show in December 2009, crediting him with having shaped the popular imagination of British viewers and listeners, it was Wogan’s fellow early morning presenter, John Humphrys of Today on Radio 4 who perhaps put his finger on the Irishman’s secret: “It is just that he puts his audience at ease. That’s why they want to listen, because they feel better about themselves after they have listened to him. He has made the nation feel at ease with itself and that’s a great gift and we owe him a lot for that.”
Terry Wogan and Dolly Parton before the recording of his chat show
Wogan confessed to a certain laziness but, as an enthusiastic reader of PG Wodehouse, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien, could lay claim to a certain erudition. One newspaper complimented the broadcaster on his cleverness in not letting on how clever he really was, but Wogan himself confessed to having only “a butterfly brain” and the knack of trotting out small bursts of Greek, Latin, Gaelic, French and German while being fluent in none.
“His style on radio is fantastical, allusive and mildly subversive,” noted Sebastian Faulks in The Sunday Telegraph in 1982. “Wogan is bland; he is old-fashioned; his Italian suits are expensive without being classy; his patter is witty without being arresting; and his hairstyle a doomed attempt to be all things to all ages.” Yet, Faulks conceded, Wogan was a phenomenon, or, as Ray Moore who preceded him in the dawn slot liked to say, a “cosmic megastar”.
Listeners wrote drifts of letters to him on subjects such as haggis-curling in Dubai, senna-pod tea, cinema usherettes, double-gusset knickers and old bicycle lamps. But beneath the bromide lay a reservoir of bile. His pungent views on the BBC ranged from the sometime director-general John Birt – “This focus group mentality is terrible” – to the “madness” of moving the sports department to Salford “just in time for the London Olympics” and “risible” breakfast television.
Nor was his disrespect for the BBC boss class confined to the man he called “Bert” Birt; he mercilessly sent up any incumbent director-general – “I see the D-G isn’t up yet. I can see his teeth in a glass on the windowsill” – and his response to a warning in 1975 to lay off was to turn up the heat. His pat answer to the risk of being fired was to point out that it was he, not the BBC, who wielded the ultimate sanction. “I can walk out.”
Wogan was the purveyor of irony to the masses, and as The Daily Telegraph leader column noted on the morning he wound up Wake Up To Wogan in December 2009: “For millions of radio listeners, breakfast time will never be the same again.”
Terry Wogan on his popular televison talk show with Audrey Hepburn
But it was the television game show Blankety Blank that transformed Wogan into a household name. Launched in 1979 it proved an instant hit with some 20 million viewers, while even the BBC’s annual report praised the show’s “harmless fun handled skilfully by Terry Wogan”. He ad-libbed, waved his strange wand-like microphone and inexorably sent up the proceedings.
By 1981, he had achieved the double, presenting the most popular programmes on British radio and television; Tatler had proclaimed him “Britain’s Best-Known Face”. A year earlier he had launched What’s On Wogan, a live Saturday teatime show, which eventually metamorphosed into Wogan. First shown in Michael Parkinson’s former Saturday night slot of 10pm, in 1985 Michael Grade moved it to weekdays at 7pm, a thrice-weekly curtain-raiser to the evening’s viewing.
It drew an average eight million viewers a night and crowned Wogan king of television. After an unfortunate start – he tripped over while introducing Elton John in the first edition – Wogan picked himself up to become the most popular and highest-paid man on television with a salary at the time of £350,000, and 3,000 letters a week.
His guests, mainly drawn from the entertainment world, included Hollywood royalty – Raquel Welch, Mel Brooks, Sophia Loren and Bob Hope among them – as well as the traditional British variety: Wogan was undaunted when the Duke of Edinburgh, booked to explain the finer points of carriage driving, rudely accused him of reading other people’s questions off cards.
There were other lows: Anne Bancroft was incandescent with rage when she discovered that Wogan would be interviewing her live, Freddie Starr spat sweets at him, and George Best turned up paralytically drunk. By the 250th edition, Philip Purser in The Sunday Telegraph detected that the show was flagging, calling it “a limp parody of a bullfight”, and another critic was unkinder still, finding it “a visible mess of self-inflicted love bites”.
Wogan himself admitted the show was nothing more than “chewing gum for the eyes” and cheerfully endured a growing sniping campaign in the press. Looking increasingly bored by his guests, it became evident that prising stories, or indeed much of any interest at all, out of them was not his strongest suit. But perhaps the point was that Wogan was a bigger star than the people he had on the sofa. “That, of course, is the essence of the show,” he explained. “That’s why people watch.”
The run of Wogan ended in 1992 to make way for the disastrous soap opera about British expatriates living in Spain, Eldorado. Having become the pre-eminent television personality of the 1980s, Wogan returned to radio and his old slot on Radio 2.
In the 1970s and early 1980s Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show had earned him a cult following and established his distinctively witty, self-effacing microphone style. Features like Fight the Flab (slimming advice) and Wogan’s Winner Racing Tips characterised the show, and Wogan’s incessant digs at the imported American television soap opera Dallas guaranteed that it became a hit. His trip to America to visit the cast of Dynasty earned the ire of Sir Robin Day, who considered it the BBC’s most humiliating moment – “awful, awful”.
As his fame grew, Wogan recognised that the 1970s were “not a great time to have an Irish accent in Britain”. Once, when he was on holiday, a bomb addressed to him arrived at the BBC, and stopped the traffic in Portland Place. But throughout the so-called Troubles, he claimed never to have received a single word or letter of condemnation or abuse. “Even allowing for the good nature and tolerance of the British,” Wogan wrote in his memoirs, “it is surprising that I have not been the butt of anti-Irish hatred.”
He had co-hosted the BBC’s annual Children in Need charity telethon since 1980 and every year assailed the entries while presenting the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual ordeal that he likened to “a numbing of the frontal lobes”. He also compèred Come Dancing, Miss World, Do The Right Thing and Auntie’s Bloomers.
His listeners liked to be known collectively as TOGS (Terry’s Old Geezers [or Gals]), with subgroups dividing into IDIOTS (I Dream Incessantly of Terry Society), TWITS (Terry Wogan Is Tops Society) and, most improbably, TWINKLETOES (Terry Wogan Is Not Kinky Like Everyone Thinks Or Everyone Says). The Queen told him she listened each morning.
A 2013 picture of Sir Terry Wogan with a collection of Pudsey Bears designed by celebrities which were auctioned for Children in Need
Michael Terence Wogan was born on August 3 1938 in Limerick, Ireland’s third largest town, where his father was a grocer. The family were lower middle class Catholics with neither car nor telephone. But they did possess a radio set, and young Terry grew up listening to the classic programmes of the 1950s on the BBC’s Light Programme, such as The Goons and Workers’ Playtime. Towards the end of the decade, as he later recalled with affection, he first heard Elvis Presley.
After Ferrybank prep school, run by Salesian nuns, he attended Crescent College, Limerick, and later (after a family move to Dublin) Belvedere College, both Jesuit-run; he was regularly and soundly thrashed with a leather strap for the non-observance of Lenten Regulations and thinking impure thoughts, which he endeavoured to suppress by becoming an enthusiastic rugby player.
At Belvedere he and his young brother Brian starred in Gilbert and Sullivan productions, an experience that led to his joining the Rathmines and Rathgar Musical and Dramatic Society and appearances in shows like Naughty Marietta and Bitter Sweet at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. He also sang as an extra in productions by the Dublin Grand Opera Society.
When he spotted a newspaper advertisement for announcers at Radio Éireann, the Irish national broadcaster, in 1963 he applied – along with nearly 10,000 others – and was astonished to be offered a four-week evening training course to learn the basics of broadcasting. After passing an audition reading out the fatstock prices, he was offered a full-time post and resigned his bank job.On leaving school Wogan joined the Royal Bank of Ireland – the republic’s smallest – as a £5-a-week clerk, first at the branch in Cornmarket in the oldest part of Dublin, and later at the Phibsborough branch near the cattle market. The hours were short and his duties not onerous: sorting florins from half-crowns, exchanging soiled banknotes for new ones, and knotting and sealing lodgement dockets; nevertheless, after four years the life palled.
As well as reading the news, Wogan presented a hospitals request show and commentated on the funeral of the second president of Ireland, Sean O’Kelly, and, in June 1963, the visit to Ireland of the young American president John F Kennedy. When the fledgling Irish Television Service RTE recruited newsreaders, Wogan was hired to present the main half-hour bulletins. He once struggled to contain a nosebleed on air, to the amusement of the elderly Special Branch man, armed with a Smith and Wesson revolver, who guarded the studio on the other side of a locked door.
Having sent an audition tape to the BBC in London, in 1965 Wogan was offered Midday Spin on the Light Programme, which he presented down a line from an RTÉ studio in Dublin. Two years later another tape – of his Radio Éireann show Terry Awhile – landed him an audition for the BBC’s new nightly show Late Night Extra on the newly-launched Radios 1 and 2; Wogan was offered a six-week contract to present it every Wednesday, which meant flying from Dublin to London, returning the next day, for an all-in fee of £35 to cover air fares and hotels. .
Terry Wogan with his wife Helen on their wedding day He resigned his RTÉ job to move, with his wife and baby son, to England, where the BBC offered him a second weekly shift on Late Night Extra. He stood in for Jimmy Young on his morning show on Radio 1 in July 1969 and in October took over the afternoon show broadcast simultaneously on Radios 1 and 2. One of his early innovations, the Fight the Flab feature, became something of a national institution and led to his promoting Playtex women’s underwear in newspaper advertisements.
Wogan took Fight the Flab with him when in 1972 he succeeded John Dunn as presenter of Radio 2’s breakfast show. Later that year he landed his first television chat series, Lunchtime with Wogan, for ATV, shown live from studios at Elstree. The critic Nancy Banks-Smith in The Guardian was unimpressed. “The built-in hazard of such a show,” she noted, “is not that someone in the audience may drop off, but that they may drop dead ...” but in the Daily Mirror, Mary Malone admired his “warm, hot-water bottle voice”.
In April 1970 Wogan returned to Dublin to commentate for BBC radio on the Eurovision Song Contest, inaugurating a relationship that would endure for another 30 years. He covered Olympic Games for radio from Montreal (1976), Los Angeles (1984) and Barcelona (1992). In 1978 Wogan himself enjoyed a Top 40 hit with his rendition of the Cornish folk song The Floral Dance, which he performed on Top of the Pops.
He wrote a column in The Sunday Telegraph for many years and published several books, including the autobiographies, Is It Me? (2000) and Mustn’t Grumble (2006).
Having been appointed OBE in 1997, Wogan took British citizenship in 2005 and was knighted the same year. He was the recipient of numerous broadcasting awards, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Limerick. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Buckinghamshire and was a freeman of Limerick and of the City of London. In Who’s Who he listed his occupation as “jobbing broadcaster”.
Apart from Children in Need he almost never prepared for a programme or an interview, owned five wigs, but was more embarrassed by the psoriasis on his hands. In person he was a generous host, thoughtful, kindly, and good company. His eyes had irises of brilliant turquoise.
Terry Wogan married, in 1965, Helen Joyce, one of Ireland’s leading Balmain models. She survives him with their two sons and a daughter. Their firstborn daughter died at the age of three weeks.
Sir Terry Wogan, born August 3 1938, died January 31 2016
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