Profile - Terry Wogan:The beloved Irish broadcaster is to retire from his BBC radio show at the end of the year, leaving a quirky community as well as eight million listeners
TERRY WOGAN is truly loved. When the 71-year-old Limerick-born veteran broadcaster announced this week that he would be stepping down as presenter of his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show,
Wake Up to Wogan, his eight million listeners – the largest audience in British radio – were distraught. Known collectively as TOGs – Terry's Old Gits, Geezers or Gals – the loyal fans evidently feel they are losing more than a radio show.
They are mourning the passing of a community, with its own language, odd characters (including the likes of Betty Bickerdyke, Melanie Frontage and Chuffer Dandridge) and nostalgic ethos, a home for those bewildered, cynical or confused about modern life. And, at the heart of all the whimsical fun, Wogan himself, the TOGmeister in chief: happy simply to “talk rubbish for two hours”, as he says himself, and never short of that distinctive twinkle in his voice, reassuring listeners that whatever the squalour, spite or uncertainty of the world, there’s always an implied double entendre or two that can take your mind off it.
Wogan is often referred to as "the Irish voice of British radio", and it's true that he brought a kind of idealised Irishness to the role: that "lilting" accent, an avuncular warmth, an infectious love of surreal word-play, and an innate ability to set everyone at their ease (celebrated, incidentally, in the Franz Ferdinand song Matinee: "So I'm on BBC2 now, telling Terry Wogan how I made it, and/ what I made is unclear now, but his deference is and his laughter is/ My words and smile are so easy now . . .").
A Daily Telegraphcritic Gillian Reynolds considers him "the best company . . . building a humorous fantasy world out of people and names and afterthoughts that anyone who has read Flann O'Brien would recognise, though you don't have to be a Myles na gCopaleen fan to appreciate." But in many ways Wogan became an honorary Briton: Our Tel, a national treasure, knighted by the Queen; a Home Counties golfer, with his lemon polo necks and a pink silk hanky always peeking out of his blazer pocket. Writer Ben MacIntyre sees something "peculiarly English" in Wogan: "the hard work made to look effortless, the self-deprecation springing from iron self-confidence, the faux innocence disguising sophistication and ambition."
“As soon as I could afford to put down my glass of Guinness, I picked up a glass of vodka,” Wogan once quipped, and perhaps it says as much as anything about the life he’s chosen.
EDUCATED AT Crescent College, Limerick, and at Joyce’s alma mater, Belvedere College in Dublin, Michael Terence Wogan spent his first five working years in a bank, before winning a competition, aged 21, to become an announcer on RTÉ. Buoyed up by his success, he met his wife-to-be Helen, an international model, at a party in Dublin soon after: “If I was still a bank clerk I would never have crossed the room.”
His big break came in July 1969 when he provided holiday cover for Jimmy Young and proved such a hit with listeners that he was given his own show. His sunny voice and cheery face has been a familiar presence to generations of British audiences since, from his eponymous television chat show to the yearly Children in Need fund-raiser. As host of the quiz show Blankety Blank, his trademark prop was an odd-looking lollipop microphone – Wogan's Wand – mounted on a car aerial, which regularly came under attack from irrepressible panellist Kenny Everett. And for some reason, in 1978, he released a novelty single, The Floral Dance, which reached number 21 in the charts. It is regularly voted among the worst cover versions of all time.
In an unusually candid interview given more than a decade ago, Wogan describes himself as a shy person, an “inverted egomaniac”, possibly as a result of his upbringing. “Maybe this stems from my parents, who constantly used to say, ‘You’re too shy, Terry – you need to push yourself a bit more’. In many ways I’m just not suited for showbusiness . . . [it has] forced me to do so much that is against my real nature, and often I’ve suffered torture because of it.”
Part of Wogan's appeal is his modesty, which comes across as genuinely self-deprecating – neither abject nor false. Wogan is fond of joking about being around "since God was a boy", and saying that "if you do something for long enough, as I have, people confuse longevity with merit". When he appeared on Top Gear, as the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car, he came only a fraction of a second above bottom in the leaderboard, thanks to his ultra-cautious driving: "slow and steady wins the race, no-one's going to die in this car, I promise you that," he muttered – he attributed his success to his long-standing familiarity. "I'm like the wallpaper, I'm like a dirty ould rug in the kitchen." Still, he wasn't going to put up with Clarkson cocking an eyebrow at his own vehicle. "Don't you patronise my Bentley," he flashed, with an edge of steel.
EVIDENTLY WOGAN is not always quite as cosy and cuddly as the Aran cardigans he favours, but because his jibes are delivered without spleen, he usually gets away with it. “The little chap does his best,” he said, with splendid condescension, of rival DJ Chris Moyles. And when former sports presenter David Icke, clad in a sky-blue shellsuit, outed himself as the son of God on Wogan’s television chat show, the host bluntly broke it to him that the audience was “laughing at you . . . not laughing with you”. He loves to puncture perceived hubris too, such as when he recently attacked huffy “self important” news presenters whose job, he said, is “a piece of cake”.
But it was during his 38 years of Eurovision Song Contest commentaries that Wogan was really able to indulge his gleeful cynicism and caustic wit, to the delight of viewers – and the resentment of the contest’s director, Bjorn Erichsen, who described him as “a problem because he makes it look ridiculous”. (One insider even claimed that there was a “how to combat what Wogan says” document in circulation at one stage, filled with voting statistics to combat his attacks.) Wogan described the Danish hosts of the 2001 event as “Doctor Death and the Tooth Fairy” – comments that caused outrage in Denmark.
As writer Victor Lewis-Smith remarked, “He’s never invaded Poland, of course, nor (to the best of my knowledge) has he ever set fire to the Reichstag, but his annual contribution to the Eurovision Song Contest has surely done (in peacetime) for European brotherhood what the Third Reich only achieved by war.”
Wogan was unrepentant, telling delegates at the annual Eurovision TV summit in Lucerne that while he loved the contest as “an exciting, camp, foolish spectacle”, it was nonetheless a “triumph of appalling taste”. “Everybody knows it’s rubbish,” he added.
He wears his learning lightly, but as Gillian Reynolds points out, Wogan has “an enormously rich range of reference,” with Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Shakespeare tripping easily from his tongue. On one occasion, he paid homage to his famous Belvedere antecedent: “I, and everybody else like me who gives a rattling damn, know where James Joyce is coming from. I know Sandymount Strand: I got lost there once. I wish I’d known Buck Mulligan. I’ve swum in the Forty Foot, where women aren’t allowed, and even swum naked in the freezing Irish Sea. I’ve had many a drink in Davy Byrne’s.”
WOGAN HAS been agonising about retiring for years, in interviews constantly returning to the topic of the right time to go. Confirming his departure on Monday, he said that he wanted to make his own way to the exit, before someone led him to it: “I’d rather leave while we’re in love, as the song says, while the programme is the most popular on British radio, while we still delight in each other’s company.”
Despite his overwhelming popularity, Wogan knew he was something of an anachronism in a broadcasting world that increasingly celebrates youthful excess and borderline anarchy.
“I do wonder if I would make it in radio today,” he said recently. “Probably not. Things are more confrontational now. They want people who are louder, brasher, more shouty. I don’t like shouty.”
In one of many tributes to Wogan over the last few days, writer Allison Pearson mused that “while Chris Moyles on the Radio 1 breakfast show carries on like he is down the pub, spraying crude sexist abuse around to look big in front of his mates, Terry is more like the Mr Mulliner character in PG Wodehouse, who sits in a saloon bar nursing a hot scotch and lemon, spinning stories.”
Unrepentantly uncool, unfailingly genial, and still refusing to confirm or deny the age-old question of whether that lush head of hair is a wig, Terry Wogan is moving on.
He’s still sticking to his golden rule of broadcasting: “Get on your toes, keep your wits about you, say goodnight politely when it’s over, go home and enjoy your dinner.”
CV TERRY WOGAN
Who is he?Veteran Irish broadcaster and UK national treasure
In the news becausehe has announced his departure from his BBC Radio 2 breakfast programme, Wake Up to Wogan, the most listened-to radio show in the UK
Hear him sayingthe ancient motto of the Wogans: "Time flies like an arrow - but fruit flies like a banana."
Never hear him say"It's true - I have a different toupée for every day of the week."
Essential trivia:"I go commando."